NJPoets Index

Great NJ Poet's Portraits

NJ Fiction

NJ Reviews

NJ Contest Winners

NJPoets News

Gioseffi.com

PoetsUSA.com
(Wise Women's Web)

Italian American Writers.com

NJ Past Events

Winner 2000 Poem: "Washing Away the Dead" by Melissa Montimurro of Layton

Melissa Montimurro lives in Layton with her husband and four sons. The testosterone level in her house, she jokes, leaves her little time for sending out her poetry for publication. She holds a B.A. in English and Comparative Literature from Fairleigh Dickinson University. This devoted mother has read with Skylands Writers & Artists Association at Centenary College and Sussex County Community College, and in the coming season she will help to host and arrange a series of open readings on the campus in Newton. She has been particualrly astute and deligent in writing upbeat critiques for her fellow workshop members. This poem won the Joe Salerno Contest judged by B.J Ward for the year 2000.

WASHING AWAY THE DEAD

(WORRIES OF A MORTICIAN'S DAUGHTER)

Imagining something of the dead still on your hands,

I insisted that you wash before holding me.

Your days were spent prolonging the flesh,

so when you said, "Daughter,

you think I'd embalm a body and leave my hands unwashed?"

I saw a liar or a saint or a madman laid before you on a table,

trading blood for a bowlful of wounds.

Unshaven or clean as stone,

the dead were dreaming their dreams,

struggling to remember the things that were slipping away:

a certain crowd of asters in a yard,

someone named Gerard or John.

Everything they'd known becoming insubstantial,

uneasy as unexpected light.

"The body is just a room," you said,

and you murmured your prayers

each time before you began.

So that's how you could touch their eyes

to lace them shut forever,

leaving behind all the questions

we think are answered by sight alone.

The pink Sunday dress, the brown-haired puppy

unknowable from this new distance.

How peculiar that we make the dead

new again for the living.

As if erasing blood from the body

outwits death for one more day.

What was I afraid would escape those emptied temples

and find me?

Maybe death could come too close through you,

dancing home unseen on the shoulders of your jacket.

What if it could whistle

through the apartment like a terrible wind,

or walk right in and crouch behind the sofa?

So, at home

you shed your loam-black suit

like a bag of old skin.

You shook the splintered bones

of the dead from your pockets

so I could hear them rattle on the dresser.

Then you took the soap,

slippery as a spleen,

and folded your fingers

around and around it.

You let me see you wash

till the water fell clean as lace

from your hands,

and the idle caress of the dead

tenderly forgotten.

Copyright © 2000 by Melissa Montimurro. All rights reserved.

[Back to Top]