My mother is ready to become forgotten.
Her instructions: no funeral. No flowers.
Suppress all obituaries. Reject all donations —
impossible all the way into the grave, that's her,
and I am shamefully eager to let her vanish,
to let the space of years bear away
the grit of her pettiness, the tow of entitlement,
the unceasing current of ugly, irrelevant judgments.
I am keen to erase her, she
who regarded my writing as a squandering
of time and ovaries. And yet I weep
and cannot help but write these words,
ensuring her ghost a print among my papers.
Peg Duthie works as a copyeditor in Nashville, Tennessee. Her poems have appeared in earlier issues of flashquake and elsewhere.