How We Ride Into the Afterlife

by Ronda Piszk Broatch

I want to waltz into that Harley showroom
just off the highway, say in my outdoor voice 

I’m here to photograph your hogs. Don’t worry,
it’s all a pleather dream, like the one where

a stranger coats me in grey latex paint & we
sharpen our knives together. There’s a wild

woman inside all of us, within each muscle,
molecule, waxing moon so large & close I burn

my fingers, my eyes floating with ghosts.
What I didn’t tell you was how father & mother

took their styrofoam ostrich on vacation. I uncover
shots of Oscar: stretching his Pom Pom legs

in Tennessee bluegrass, eating Chinese takeout
in a motel room in Kentucky, snoozing

on a cross-stitched pillow. All those lost years
scrambling the dunes just to wave at cabooses.

Didn’t we tell each other We can be heroes,
even as we fall to our deaths? What breaks

my heart is not how easily my parents went on
with their lives after I left them. I still hide

something wild & beautiful inside me,
almost piercing in moon-bright chrome.

Poet and photographer, Ronda Piszk Broatch is the author of Lake of Fallen Constellations (MoonPath Press 2015). Ronda was a finalist for the Four Way Books Prize, and her poems have been nominated several times for the Pushcart prize. Her journal publications include Blackbird, Prairie Schooner, Sycamore Review, Mid-American Review, Puerto del Sol, and Public Radio KUOW’s All Things Considered, among others.