Next
Namesake
by Adrienne Lewis
Which way do we face to talk to the dead?
—Sharon Olds
It is hard to see you stretched so thin,
sheer against the wall of your fears, Dying
or living without the capacity to recognize
the curve of your daughter’s belly
has emptied. Your mind
may not understand she has named her
after you. There is always hope
you will though. So the next time you speak
to your brother Edwin, long since departed,
when he visits you in the sleepless dark,
slips past nurses changing shifts
and the blood red tubes emptying
your latest surgical notch,
turn towards these trepidations,
look him in the eye and tell him you’re not ready
to be lifted from this plane: where life rolls onward,
syllables forming the next generation.