"Pillow Talk"

E. A. Hanninen - 2008

      Laura A. Ciraolo

        Last Will and Testament

Bury me with my books
a casket of a bookcase
as I lie silent in a suit
selected by my family.

In my folded hands, place
my copy of Hopkins near
my heart, caesuras ceased.

Under my head, pillows
of Romantics, Victorians,
Moderns, anthologies
of anthologies, thick volumes,
millions of soft tissue pages.

Cover me in slim paperbacks
sewn together, their colorful
covers pieced together
as a blanket of voices.

At my feet place Jane Kenyon
and Donald Hall like
bricks of warmth in
a New England winter.

Line my coffin with fiction
and mystery, my favorite
jacket with a window cut
to frame a rotting peach.

Beowulf should be
stuffed in my mouth
between clenched teeth,
a grimace, a grin, a victory.

And pile the rest, a pyre
of towering proportions,
to burn with a brightness
turning night into noon*
as the words on each page
fire and sing their last song
transmitting and transmuting
all my worldly possessions
into ashes, smoke, light.




* “Turning night into noon” is a line taken from Hen Wen’s prophecy
in Lloyd Alexander’s The High King.

Medieval Device, ca. 1400s

Laura A. Ciraolo lives and works in New York City. Her poems have appeared in Rumble, New York Quarterly #63, Long Island Quarterly, iota #78 (UK), MiPOesias, Orbis Quarterly International Literary Journal, Boston Literary Magazine and Shattercolors. Laura says that when she’s not reading or writing, she’s finishing a graduate degree in Theology.

This is Laura’s second appearance in The Centrifugal Eye.