The first time my neighbor performed a dirge,

We did not encircle her.

We did not retrieve her golden scarf from the dirt or wipe the cluster of sweat-mixed sand from her arms and legs and hair.

We did not leave our washing to help because she did not do any of these things.

Rather, she yelled in Ascending ABs, at her children.

She yelled when the youngest spilled her morning meal of a bowl of overcooked spaghetti and it crashed in countable strings on the pavement.

She yelled when she couldn’t find the box of match sticks she kept by the cooking stove, and some more when she stubbed her right toe on the broken tiles while she tried to hit her eldest daughter for losing the box of match sticks.

She yelled in many tunes of tiredness like an old bridge collapsing.

We understood each in the way she had meant them, not in the way she said them.

We understood that she was only Mike Jaggering to the tune of all the tiny voices painting portraits of blood and gore and missing hands and limbs.

This is what happens when your husband gets drafted into a war,

Tiny voices whisper loud things to you.

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Pack your bags, leave your children, leave your husband

The women who lived behind the fence are gone,

they left behind baskets of water and quiet factories

And a memory so old yet short, it might never have happened

I remember cold afternoons and sunny mornings

Of  husbands marching to factories

Husbands who whispered and drank a little too much,

Coughed  in circles and returned with empty sacks,

Cursed with burning tongues and laughed at the corny-eyed neighbor

neighbors who shot at cats and threw loud parties

Who waited for the morning to slip into each other's rooms

Rooms,

Rooms Made from cement,

From grief,

From sweat

with tiny windows, hollowed-out walls, and constricting air

Air that stank

Air that oozed blood

Air that stung wives in the eyes and made them sob

Wives,

Wives who held unto exposed kitchen sinks

Who tore at their flesh and pinched at their nipples

Who let out fish stench and stubbed cigarette butts into their arms

Cigarette butts

Cigarette butts by the bench

On the sink

Behind the acacia

In the ocean

Inside whales

large ones

Okay ones

Rude ones,

And In children’s hair

Children who bled

Who ran And hid behind trees

Who stole and threatened to tell

Who cried

Who lied

Who fled?

The women who lived behind the fence have returned

Without their bags, without their husbands or children,

without their wet cigarette butts.

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Mary kills the cats

In the old red Mitsubishi,
There are two mother cats,
Tiny kittens lie on old, dusty car seats,
Their mothers forage for food behind Mary’s window every night,
She comes out and shoos them away
They purr and scamper away,
And catwalk back as she shuts her door,
Mary brings another Lords Chosen sticker and slaps it on her window
It reads, “Satan go away, Jesus lives here”
At exactly 11:25 pm, she mutters in tongue
And sprinkles some holy water around her house
But the hungry cats return
At exactly 1.10 am,
Mary opens her door and walks to the soakaway
There, she spreads out a tray of dried fish
Five days later,
There’s a foul stench in the air
We find the family of cats lying in the old red Mitsubishi
All dead.
Mary walks past us as we gather in mourning and sings a “thank you Jesus” tune.