Poor Yorick by Michelle Bitting

Poor Yorick

On the lip of descent into chaos, my spirit
yearns for halcyon hours,
a longing for daisies, for excavated
jest, for the brother who slung me
like a cross over his shoulders
walking home from school, past
parochial lawns and gnarled
oaks, their old man steeple arms, past
Witchy Witchy Wilson’s house—
spinster lady with unkempt hair
we’d glimpse on occasion watering her pansies
with a droopy black hose, a broken-necked
swan regurgitating rivers
into the eyes of her violet blooms. Everyone
crossed the street to avoid contact,
in case she cast a spell
or tried to eat us—the irony being
that when she died
she wasn’t found for weeks
and rumor had it and neighborhood kids tattled
how her cats had nibbled away
at the decomposing flesh, alone
in a cruel world that doesn’t touch
or move you until the full dark duende
shovels your dankest soil up
and with it the skull you name Brother,
the one who went crazy
years after he piggy-backed you home
but a minute ago, wasn’t it?
I can hear his tender laughter
and I can touch the clown suit
made of many-colored squares mother sewed
that he loved to wear on Halloween,
big enough for a 6ft. man—the pleated
blue and white gingham collar
with pinking-sheared edges
that flared and circled his neck like a quilted corona,
his smile belying the pit
of goblins buried in his gut—
an inexplicably princely
and decaying gorgeous core
where worms grow fat as little gods
orbiting the dirt, or
thrumming and laughing beneath
sidewalks, the rotten marks
and hard-won steps
of brothers and sisters,
(and every living fool
when you think of it)
who eventually comes to pass.

*

Michelle Bitting was short-listed for the 2023 CRAFT Character Sketch Challenge, the 2020 Montreal International Poetry Prize, the 2021 Fish Poetry Contest judged by Billy Collins, and a finalist for the 2021 Coniston Prize and 2020 Reed Magazine Edwin Markham Prize. She won Quarter After Eight’s 2018 Robert J. DeMott Short Prose Contest and was a finalist for the 2021 Ruminate Magazine, 2019 Sonora Review and New Millennium Flash Prose contests. She is the author of five poetry collections, Good Friday Kiss, winner of the inaugural De Novo First Book Award; Notes to the Beloved, which won the Sacramento Poetry Center Book Award; The Couple Who Fell to Earth; Broken Kingdom, winner of the 2018 Catamaran Poetry Prize and a recipient of a Starred Kirkus Review; and Nightmares & Miracles (Two Sylvias Press, 2022), winner of the Wilder Prize and recently named one of Kirkus Reviews 2022 Best of Indie. Her chapbook Dummy Ventriloquist is forthcoming in 2024. Bitting is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Literature at Loyola Marymount University.