expirations & everyday low prices
i carried your ashes with me into Target & someone asked what aisle they could find you in. i put you in the pantry next to canned olives, the feather duster encroaching your personal space. put you on the workbench in the garage, put you under the needle on 45 speed, stuffed you in the hallway closet behind the towels & bedding & curtains from the old apartment. tossed your name into the composter, laid the remains where we found thirty mushrooms that one year by the crabapple tree, the fractured elms. left you out in the snowbank, accruing frost at your shins, left you with the knitted hat i stole from a ghost wedged between museum bannisters. i lost you in the hamper, but it didn’t know any better. lost parts of you in the lint trap when all i had was one shirt to your name. gave your mother coffee grounds from the last time you forgot you were high, gave her tupperware with your body because the dregs were too triggering. i flew to Oklahoma to see her at the pavilion & i brought her thirteen kinds of soil to get her opinion on. she fidgeted with her toast, crumbs cradled in her lap, put your name in a present-tense sentence & couldn’t correct herself. you missed out on it, would’ve cringed at her puns, wished you weren’t in the room at all. my dad got into a car accident while i was gone, so i didn’t leave. i shared the other half of my keyring with you so you’d check on him. i put you next to your mother’s IV cart, sneak you dollops of morphine, shroud you from the fluorescence. i yanked my name out of my throat, my same throat i held your tongue with, yanked my throat out & flush it down the toilet. i put you next to flowers from the grocery, put you alongside the other pitchers your family left for your mother, put you in a place you’d blend in because you did, you put your hands against the window & cupped clouds to your chest. put spades in my lashes, dangling like snow peas, left me to unsnarl my hair in a motel room with two beds. your mother knew someone was there with her, but didn’t know who it was.
Liam Strong (they/them) is a queer neurodivergent cripple punk writer who has earned their BA in writing from University of Wisconsin-Superior. They are the author of the chapbook Everyone’s Left the Hometown Show (Bottlecap Press, 2023). You can find their poetry and essays in Vagabond City and new words {press}, among several others. They are most likely gardening and listening to Bitter Truth somewhere in Northern Michigan. Find them on Instagram/Twitter: @beanbie666. https://linktr.ee/liamstrong666