Shannon K. Winston

Every Day the Girl Prepares for Death

1.     She pulled out her agenda and a pink feather pen: When will it be?

2.     She once asked her grandmother to make an appointment.

3.     Five days after you die, visit me?

4.     Sometimes, the father she never knew has passed (will she feel anything?). 

5.     Other times, she gets the call: her mother has died (she’ll feel too many things).

6.     Her childhood friend’s father built a koi pond before he died of cancer. 

7.     She imagines it all–heart attacks, blood clots, and strokes. 

8.     She fills out a life expectancy questionnaire with different answers every time. 

9.     Some people die in their sleep, others suffocate. 

10.  She can’t keep up. 

11.  To start the flow of oxygen, put on a mask. 

12.  Don’t die on me, she tells her loved ones. 

13.  Under white sheets, she closes her eyes and slows her breath.

14.  It’s possible, she’s heard, to feel a ghost. 

15.  She mutes the traffic, the gentle creak of her window, and distant planes. 

16.  Locate the emergency exits, turn your seat into a raft.

17.  Where are the instructions for death? 

18.  It’s an honest question, but she asks no one. 

19.  She scarfs down a wafer at a friend’s church: she feels nothing.

20.  In a neighbor’s pool, she swims underwater until her lungs burn. 

21.  She hopes these rituals will bring her closer, but they never do. 

22.  She still hears the patter of footsteps in the apartment above her. 

23.  She cannot help it: it’s still all so beautiful. 

24.  She googles: “what is belief?”

Shannon K. Winston’s book, The Girl Who Talked to Paintings (Glass Lyre Press), was published in 2021. Her individual poems have appeared in Bracken, Cider Press Review, On the Seawall, RHINO Poetry, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers.