To You, To You, Dear
The dead still celebrate birthdays, taking up the cup to get shitty drunk. In the afterlife, nausea and headache replaced by feathers and a knife. Ten feathers for a butter knife but twenty for the butter. They can’t taste with fur on their drunken tongues. One hundred feathers for a carving knife, the very one the farmer’s wife used. A thousand, a scimitar in the manner of heaven. A bargain for a bottle of scotch. If the cash of the dead strikes the breathers as trifling, translate feathers as cigarettes to the jailed. Let go your years and take up the bird. Consider the dead leaning into their cups.
Autumn McClintock is a freelance writer and editor living in Philadelphia. Her newest chapbook, Dirt Bird, was recently published by Alexandria Quarterly Press, and poems of hers have appeared in The Account, Cimarron Review, Denver Quarterly, and The Georgia Review, among others. She is Poetry Editor of Doubleback Review.
