Our Recent Particles
What happens at cremation? we ask
the funeral director. Death unspectacular
isn’t instant. The mathematician says
they’ve weighed the body before and after
still nothing both inspiring and provable
suddenly leaves when we die, material
nor energy. Though oxygen stops diffusing,
nerve cells lose the wherewithal to pump ions,
and brains stop doing whatever it is brains do…
the physicist says every joule of heat
we ever carry remains—nothing destroyed.
In some cultures the dead float away, flaming
arrows shot at their bodies as in Norse
times, or rubbed with clarified butter
and, on wooden boats, lit. My son asks
why they burn her, the woman on the raft
in the Ganges, sunrise lighting saris,
brickwork and the late mother-woman.
So her spirit can fly to heaven
I answer, aware our version differs from hers.
Rapidly consumed in the energy
around us, bright orange poppies,
blazing red kernels of heat, such burning heat—
what have we ever created but this?
Brother, I Could Pretend You Were Wolverine
And then it wasn’t a story, it was only an empty cage.
—Larry Levis
What we buried in the family plot
turned to wet, tufted fur
gathering muscle at the sinewy edges
not slave to skin
but steel that would not give.
I could imagine us crossing
between chains Don’t you recognize my wolf-grey hair, my eyes
gone nettle white?
—though not too dull
to see you as you could have been—
Then it was only the bones of your knuckles
not your wrists
the slits
as easily closed as opened.
Most days I believed
your wounds could heal
like yellow flowers
mending a splintered cactus. 
A PEN/Rosenthal Emerging Voices Fellow, Jennifer Givhan is a 2015 recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts in Poetry Fellowship, as well as the 2013 DASH Literary Journal Poetry Prize winner, an Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize finalist, and a 2014 Prairie Schooner Book Prize finalist for her collection Karaoke Night at the Asylum. She will graduate from the MFA program at Warren Wilson College this January, and her work has appeared in over seventy literary journals and anthologies, including Best New Poets 2013, Prairie Schooner, Indiana Review, Rattle, The Collagist, cream city review, and The Columbia Review.
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