"My Daughter Asks If I Will Die Someday" by Natalie Giarratano

My Daughter Asks If I Will Die Someday

Centuries from now our bones
will have disintegrated
or become the new fossil
fuel, a different kind of afterlife.

We are organic.

There is meaning in every minute
of what is not wasted.

Wake missing
wake clutching your wrist
wake shifting
moon and sweetened
floodlight.

Obliterate the names
of saints with names of trees
and rivers and wildlife and poems.
Feed on the moon’s cold light —
the only face in the sky
I ever hope to look upon.

The gods do not have names
that the wind will call.

One day I will be vast
enough for your echoes
to slip carelessly through.

In other words, yes,
I will be dust.

And if you get a moonroof view
into that body
before it’s burned,
just know that every single damned cell

of it has been on fire with a kind of love
that moves past bodies and time
to find a quiet home in the
forest of your mind.

Natalie Giarratano

Natalie Giarratano is the author of two full-length poetry collections — Big Thicket Blues and Leaving Clean. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Waxwing, McNeese Review, Superstition Review, and Whale Road Review, among others. Originally from rural southeast Texas, she lives and edits in Fort Collins, CO, and was the city’s 2018 – 2020 poet laureate.

Headshot: Natalie Giarratano

Photo Credit: Staff