I Don’t Visit Your Grave

Memory evolves over time, takes
on the color of the dirt it treads. The cicada 

in family members' throats neither lives
nor hibernates in mine. I once feared 

I would eventually lose your memory to
the ground. Now I see you grow old in me. 

Your voice changes in mine. I speak
to you about memories I found 

in your closet because I couldn't handle
more than a few minutes of your death 

rattle at a time though I listened to it
for two days. We still talk and laugh and 

you still beg me to make amends with
Mom and I now get to tell you I have. 

I don't visit your newly occupied grave.
We sit at your kitchen table each morning 

in the house I grew up knowing in the town
hurt by time; you make it easier to visit.

Shoebox Speck

So much time exists between saying good-bye and the act
that makes it so. Holding hands at your deathbed.
Rummaging through shoeboxes, safes, and bureaus.
Looking for the you not thrown away but hid,
as if throwing it away meant a second living death.

Finding pictures—memories not mine, never mine, never will
be mine. Finding celebrations of a job well done, layoff papers
when job well done didn’t matter as much as bottom line.
A contract written at the pub for the plot of land that built
the house that holds a dozen childhoods. Immigration papers 

for your father who took your smile. But this leaflet just says
he stopped in Australia before landing in New York. You said

don’t forget where you come from, but beginnings exist
only some time after their start. Maybe that’s why you never
wanted to leave Rogers. You saw yourself—a home/town

hellbent on forgetting its origins but not its existence. A place
where nobody asks the pond's name or why our jobs drive us
to drink. Why drinking drives us to work. How both rob us
of everything we never own. Because our memories could not be
commodified cheaply enough to warrant a name change.

Home/Town Ode

trees pruned away from factory
housing to better see the quiet
roads just as gentle as the seldom
smiles I catch 

greet this still stranger, stranger to all
except home/town herself, it's hard
to see my memories or hers 

with so much light lacquer waving
lily pad wrapped welcome flowers 

I wonder if snow plows still
scrape her clear only after the factory
street or if power still goes out for days 

I wonder if smiles look genuine
because I’m alert today or their teeth
don’t know my bite marks like tree
shadows do, are the names we gave 

these apartment buildings still
alive or has the legacy we thought
we owned rusted 

my absence looks good on you

Author’s Biography

Rene Mullen’s work can be found in Santa Fe Literary Review, Blue Collar Review, Poets.org, and is the winner of the 2023 Charles and Fanny Fay Wood Poetry Prize. Rene has been on multiple poetry slam teams, on regional stages, and holds an MFA from Randolph College. Born and raised in the village of Rogers, Connecticut, Rene calls the Southwest home.