Gravestones: A Series of Prose Poems
The White Tombstone, “Rosa”
By Megan Baxter

Rosa not of roses but of lilies in the valley, ringing in the silence there, pearls on a string, the taste of powdered milk and aspirin, eggplant flesh and your ankles, in the field at night when you held a mirror to the moon and asked for a sight of the future and, gasping, handing it off to a sister or a friend, thought ‘love looks like that?’ and you wished that all you had seen there was the moon and the whole reflected world and your own, almost beautiful face like a saucer of cream, tenderly shaking in the hand. The hollow where the garden flowers spread and became wild, there you read about God from a small, white book, how rising from the dead the Son had met his women friends, those who cared for bodies bandaged or naked, kissed the cold brows of saints. Your bones blanch like bellflowers, crumbling gracefully into each other.