by Claire Scott

We are running out of room
Pastoral graveyards with sold out
Signs pepper the landscape
Where to put Uncle Mort
Convinced he must be buried
To be resurrected and
Sit on God’s right
Do we need to recycle corpses
The way we recycle glass
Placing bins at the curb
Each Wednesday

Greece has an enticing policy
For those short on soil
Rent-a-grave for three years
Then relatives arrive to witness
Digging, exhuming bones,
(the body not yet decomposed)
Tossing them in a shoebox
For storage in an ossuary
If no one shows up
(missed plane, poor directions)
The bones are dissolved
In chemicals
In a mass grave

On second thought…

Let’s bury in layers
Like ancient cities
Built on others’ ruins
Corpse on top of corpse
A neighborhood with
No choice of neighbors
How would it be to rest
With a rap musician
Living above and someone
Swearing at the ceiling
Lying below
An appalling ménage à
Trois soon to be à quatre or à cinq
Always room for one more
Maybe members of the NRA
Rustling guns, clicking triggers
Or a fundamentalist sect
Singing praises around the clock
While you plug your ears

Crowded, moldering, noxious
A cacophony of sound
In soundless night
Full moon watching
Fat worm waiting

On third thought…

Consider cremation

Claire Scott is an award winning poet who has published in a number of literary magazines. She was recently nominated for the 2014 Pushcart Prize. Claire is a winner of the Arizona State Poetry Society 2013 Annual Poetry Contest. She has published in Trivia, Write Wing, Stepping Stones, Epiphany, Organs of Vision and Speech, Red Savina Review, Writers Tribe Review, Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, Common Threads, Poydras Review, First Day and Sanskrit among others. Her forthcoming first collection of poems, Waiting to be Called, will be published by IF SF Press in the fall of 2014. Claire is a Marriage and Family Therapist with a private practice in Berkeley, CA.