Because It Is Our Custom Not to Eat Our Dead by Laura Lauth


 
 
Then something else,
                                      something like
first kiss: bolt and sudden blow,

bare-breasted, a second to decide:
                                                      gathering

the skin, the jaw, the eyelid, pulling
the heel, the hips
                                 into it. When buried,

they do not come again. Next time,
                                                        to dying
give nothing. These plans:

to use the bone, the salt, lips—
to pull the head up, the face up, like this:
 
 
 
Laura Lauth teaches creative writing at the University of Maryland’s Jiménez-Porter Writers’ House, where she served as founding director from 2002-2005. She was recipient of the spring 2014 Orlando Prize in Poetry, and her poems have recently appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, The Los Angeles Review and Painted Bride Quarterly, among others. She lives outside Washington, DC with her husband and two sons.