2 Poems

by anita olivia koester

cartography of a missing body

In some cultures  mourning must end  after forty days or the stomach  will fill with wet earth and the
liver with dirt and no fires will ever burn again  around the heart. If there had been  a body, if I could
have confirmed  my father’s death,  walked up to the wrecked car… cut the soles  of my feet  on the
glass.  Bled there on the road he bled on.  If I had known the town and called its sheriff, if there had
been more  than  that  cardboard  box.  If I hadn’t  imagined  it was sent  by a friend,  some  random
cadaver burnt, a handsome cop paid off to fake the death of a felon. A new picture glued to a dead
man’s passport.  You see  what I mean  about the body.  This was my  thirteen  year old  fantasy: my
father sits  in a new car  on my street,  stops me,  tells me  not to tell  anyone he  is alive.  When this
didn’t happen,  I wrote a fake  suicide  note so I could start  a new life  somewhere  else with a new
name. Just like my father must have done.

Cartography of a keyhole

My mother’s drawers are full of keys:
keys clinking against other keys

with their brass heads, their cyclops heads.
I ask my mother, what my father did for work

before he went to prison for bank-robbery,
she says he was a locksmith.

(It should have been a joke.)

I think of all the things he stole from me—
little things at first: his warmth, his scent,

the songs he would have sung to me;
and then larger: the vacations we never took,

the houses we never lived in,
a younger sibling never born. The facts

he would have taught me: the length
of the longest whale, the weight

of the largest glacier—how to pick a lock.

Some fathers own guns and think they’re gods.
Some fathers teach the wrong kind of lessons—

the ability to break into a home with complete silence,
take the belongings of others and become absence.

Lately, I’ve been considering that absence
doesn’t make the heart grow—it shrinks it down,

compresses it until it is a small mass
that I fear will become malignant.