Dylan and Katherine are a brother and sister who discovered they had independently written different poems on the same topic.
After The Men Are Dead
Katherine Seitel
After the men are dead the women find comfort in one another.
Margaret’s went first. He had a bad heart and died young,
just 40-years-old.
He built, lovingly, a doghouse in the backyard
and left four child sized noses, sniffling,
and two adult female hands,
wringing in grief and anxiety.
Jean’s went next, a mistake at the hospital
that was really just too much whiskey.
He was not even forty-years-old.
He built a strong stone wall,
protection for the chipmunks
that would raise generations in the gaps in the stones of the wall.
He left two, one too young to see his flaws,
the other whose bond with him was so tenuous it had almost severed entirely.
Jean was bedridden for a year;
half in grieving, a quarter in fear, and a quarter in relief.
And Beth’s last- his choice, she said.
He was not far, but his lack of presence in the neighborhood
Was well documented by nosy neighbors head-shakes
Of disapproval at their now broken home.
Yes, as far as they were concerned, he too had died.
He left three, troubled and reckless, arms crossed in indifference.
Beth took to rescuing orphaned wildlife in their
small suburban haven,
though her nails, bitten to the quick,
gave voice to her disquieted mind.
And after Beth’s was gone, the children knew that the men were gone,
but did they care?
Yes, the men had tenderly built
the doghouse and the stone wall that the chipmunks lived in
and yes, Beth’s had bought a hockey net with
real-wood-hockey-sticks for them
but did they care?
Did they care that the men had died?
The women, they aged,
like the children aged and grew up
and moved away to places nearby and to places not so nearby.
The women grew old together
and acquired pets to raise
like they had raised the children.
And they shared the low maintenance pet raising
as they had shared the high maintenance child raising.
The men were decidedly dead and after they died the women looked after one another.
Drexel Hill 1974
Dylan Seitel
The children of St. Dorothy’s died falling from trees,
impaling themselves on branches.
They lost limbs and heads on highways,
severed neatly,
when those extremities wandered through the windows of family cars to taste the air.
Without after school programs they were snapped up on their way home to Pilgrim lane on Reservation and Apache and Oleander.
Or were clipped dispassionately by the speeding cars on Township Line.
Priests were dodged with expertise
and flatly refused private audience when subtlety failed.
(When the reports aired in the aughts everyone read them with nodding heads, suspicions confirmed.)
My mother’s childhood seems an account of near misses, of clever escapes.
Six years old, walking home alone she took flight and then refuge with a neighbor from the big sedan and it’s coaxing, sinister driver.
The nuns were her allies more then once when she flat-out refused to be alone with one of the risky priests (she was right, and lucky.)
At ten the nuns rushed to her aid again, dragging her from hungry traffic on Township Line when she collapsed in an epileptic fit.
Her father died a saint when she was in sixth grade, mid fight with her older sister. He’d been half drunk since he was twelve. Everyone was shocked.
His funeral was among the largest ever held.
He’d known the whole world, they all assembled,
paid their respects,
and retreated, as if by consensus.
She navigated the back streets alone every morning from then on,
sat with nuns and widows and heard a Latin Mass at six sharp every morning.
She sang the hymns with a modest, Catholic, voice, knew the mass by heart
and lit votive candles for the dead.
