How (Not) to Die

She says that today, during recess,
they played dying. Basically, she says,
dying is when all the kids crowd

onto the slide until someone falls
over its side, and you cling to the edge
because the chipped rubber turf below

is death. A friend has to save you,
she says, and if they fail—if you’re lost
to the ground despite the hands

of your friend outstretched—you die.
But, she adds, if you die, you get
to come back as a ghost, climb

up the slide, and pull the socks off
your friend. In other words, you get
to haunt the one who tried hardest

to prevent your demise, take a little
of their warmth with you, leave them
less complete than they were, set

a fraction of their own body beyond
their understanding. And this strikes me
as unfair before it registers as accurate

too—so true, in fact, that it explains
survivor’s guilt in a way that makes
humans seem reasonable. Every ghost

will have its due. No one who lives
will remain completely whole. Friends,
who needs dreams or the cryptic ways

of the unconscious mind when there are
children on playgrounds, processing
what it is to exist in a world built

only by hands that cannot survive
or save it? When I tell my daughter
what I, a grownup, think is fair in life

and death, she looks at me with the same
pity any god might show me, as if to say
thinking has only ever gotten us so far.

*

Abby E. Murray (they/them) is the editor of Collateral, a literary journal concerned with the impact of violent conflict and military service beyond the combat zone. Their book, Hail and Farewell, won the Perugia Press Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. Abby served as the 2019-2021 poet laureate for the city of Tacoma, Washington, and currently teaches rhetoric in military strategy to Army War College fellows at the University of Washington.