The Denial

Erin Cisney

There’s a bald impostor in her father’s coffin,
skeletal fingers and cheek bones prominent
as a pharaoh entombed, this is not the man
who taught her to bait hooks and ride cycles,
took her to rock concerts when she was thirteen,
his jet black hair braided to the waist and tan
as the Indians in his favorite western movies,
smoking Marlboro reds like the real cowboy he was, No.
This is a stranger delicate and brittle as a woman,
asleep on satin and the daughter’s not going to cry.
She’ll slip out the second the priest breathes Amen
and smoke cigarette after cigarette in angry puffs
leaning bad girl style against the wall of the funeral home.