Cinerarium
Carmel L. Morse
Childhood memories -
braided white fuses
on Chinese firecrackers
burn to black carbon,
explode into jet streams of images
and blind my eyes to bright white.
Action speeds up in
silent movies.
Daddy’s blue-veined
pale palm strikes
my face with a brisk snap.
Chubby child hands
cool as antiseptic
touch the scarlet polka-dots.
Daddy dead in 1973
wears his brown velour bathrobe
flames devour him in the oven
cremated ashes,
pieces of bone,
in a shimmering gold foil box
glitzy as his Ronson lighter
that lit a million cigarettes
and turned his lungs to
black briquettes.
Aunt Pat sends old photos of him -
age seventeen
devil in his cold laser beam eyes
stabs ice into my heart.
I watch the phosphorous match
end fizz and glow
and touch it to the picture paper.
Daddy’s eyes turn to smoke curls
that fly into the present.
At the cemetery near the duck pond
I kneel by his name at the grave my mind
burns with childhood pain.
Over the letters I trail my fingertips
wishing they were acetylene torches
melting off the words “Beloved Father.”
