By Jeff Worley

Featured Art: Stephen Reichert, Untitled, 2013. Oil on canvas, 12″ x 12″. “Cirlce” series.

—East Lawn Palms Cemetery, Tucson
(for Mike & Steve)

My brothers and I stood under the tent
with our mother’s ashes. I had flown
the bundled urn from Lexington.

We waited for Alice Lewiston,
the Family Service Coordinator,
to meet up with us.

She had told me I couldn’t bury
the ashes myself.
There were legal procedures.

I unwrapped the gray vase decorated
with smiling cherubs. It weighed nearly nothing.
When Alice came, I handed her the vase.
She’d told me that Mom’s ashes would be lowered
into the cylindrical hole above Dad,
directly above his chest.

My brothers and I listened as pitchforks of lightning
lit the sky and rain pocked dirt around the tent.

Then she slid the vase down and secured the lid.
Now Mother was snug in the Arizona soil she loved,
Dad in his plush bed.

What else after all those years with them was left
for us to do?  We loved them for what they’d done
for us.  We must have had some words
we could chisel into the electrified air
to mark the moment.

We stood there saying nothing, not looking
at each other, our hands pocketed. I took out
the poem I had brought.

Mom, Dad, there are no words . . . , the poem began.
The poem I didn’t read.

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Jeff Worley, Kentucky Poet Laureate for 2019-2020, has published seven books of poetry and edited an anthology from University Press of Kentucky titled What Comes Down to Us: 25 Contemporary Kentucky Poets. His latest book, The Poet Laureate of Aurora Avenue: Selected Poems, was published by Broadstone Books in Frankfort, KY and nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

Stephen Reichert (American, b. 1975), Baltimore City, Maryland, is a multidisciplinary artist with recent solo shows at Hancock Solar Gallery, Co_Lab, Baltimore City Hall, and Sotheby’s Roland Park Gallery; a current show at The Fox Building; and group shows at Ellington-White Contemporary, The Peale Museum, American Visionary Art Museum, Arts Fort Worth, University of Maryland, National Art League, Cerulean Arts Gallery, Abington Art Center, Sebastopol Center for the Arts and many others. He is the editor of the poetry magazine Smartish Pace. Reichert is represented by K. Hamill Fine Art & Design.