Obit

by Victoria Chang

How the skin responds to a wedding dress in the same way it responds to rain.

The way grief is really about future absence. The way the future closes its offices when a mother dies. What’s left: a hole in the ground the size of violence.

When language leaves, all you have left is tone, all you have left are smoke signals. I didn’t know she was using her own body as wood.

The obituary writer said the obituary is the moment when someone becomes history.

I shoved the teeth into my mouth. But having two sets of teeth only made me hungrier.

To acknowledge death is to acknowledge that we must take another shape.