The funeral home was in an old farmhouse that had become an island within Northern Virginia’s ever-growing exurbs. When I saw it, I knew Mom would have loved it—that mattered to me somehow.
One of us was required to identify her body there, but I couldn’t bear to see her. I thought she might look as if she were asleep, but I knew whatever they did would make her look even less like herself—Mom never wore make-up. My fiancé offered to do. One of us was required to identify her body there. I don’t know why we didn’t have to do this at her home or at the morgue, but I suppose it was because she had laid all of her identification out for the police.
“She looked fine,” he said. “It was peaceful.” I tried to make this make me feel peaceful too. It didn’t.
The next day, my sister and I sat on the wraparound porch of the funeral home, waiting for Mom’s ashes. As we looked out into the sunshine, I blinked and saw Mom there in the space between us. Her stocky legs were crossed at the knee, her pointy knee cap sticking up from below her shorts. She had a smile on her face. “Isn’t this a beautiful view? What a sunny day!” she said. “I’m so glad I get to be here with you.” I knew then what it means to be haunted, a trick not of light but of memory.
She was there especially at my grandparents’ summer cottage, which she had loved. I would turn the corner into the kitchen and have a vision of her bending over the dishes, then looking up and out over the sea as she loved to do. If she was not in the house, it was not because she had died, it was because she had gone down the path to the beach to put her feet in the sand and to give thanks to “Earth, sea, sun, and sky,” as she liked to do, or had walked into town to mail a postcard.
I should have done the identification. I knew her body almost as well as I know my own. I know her stretch marks, the soft shape of a belly that never recovered from holding twins. The smooth skin of her face, pale and unblemished. The tip of her narrow nose. Her thin lips that would break into a wide smile, bright and open. I can see her hands so clearly. Although she was never concerned with fashion, her fingernails were always long and elegant. She tended to them herself, softening the cuticles and filing and soaking them until they were beautiful and strong. I remember snuggling next to her and putting my arm around hers, pulling on her hands and examining them without asking, without question. When we arrived at the cemetery, I wanted to lay on the grave and put my head on her stone the way I used to put my head on her shoulder.
When my mother died, I felt as though something had been removed from my body, as if she were now a phantom limb, an extension of myself that felt present even when it was gone. Now, ten years later, she returns to me. When I look down at my body at forty and after bearing two children, I see my mother’s form.
Naomi Coquillon is a working mother (and occasional writer) living in Maryland. She works in the field of museum education; she is currently the Chief of Informal Learning at the Library of Congress. Her published writing to date is focused on my profession and includes articles in the Journal of Museum Education, Social Studies and the Young Learner, and Museum Magazine. An excerpt of her memoir that explores her biracial identity will be published in The Nasiona Magazine this year.
Nathaniel Bek is a writer, artist, and activist originally from Wisconsin. He was selected Editor’s Choice for poetry in Phoenix – Art & Literary Magazine, and was a semifinalist for Eber & Wien. Several of the poems have been published in Narrative Northeast. He has competed nationally for Spoken Word at the National Poetry Slam and Individual World Poetry Slam. He was the organizer, and host of “Get Lit,” a literary series that was nominated for Best of Orlando. Nathaniel also assists with various youth programs in the Orlando area where he currently resides. He can be found on all social media at NCBEK Poetry.
Libby Goss has an MFA in poetry from Boston University and a BA in creative writing, marketing, and publishing from NYU. Her work has previously been published on Confluence (NYU Gallatin) and in the anthology If You’re Not Happy Now (Broadstone Books).
Vivian Montgomery is a Boston-based harpsichordist and accordionist who writes. Her work centers around music, historical excavation of long-buried women composers, her mother, and unlikely Judaism. Her personal essays have been published in the Boston Globe Magazine, Bluestem, Ligeia, Adanna, Jabberwock, Chautaqua Review, and in the anthology Mother Reader by Seven Stories Press. Her personal essay “Immersion” received a Writers Digest Prize for Spiritual Writing, and was a finalist for New Letters’ Conger Beasley Jr. Award for Nonfiction. She is a brooding walker and mother, feeling her way with the help of words spilled onto the page. She is also on the faculty of the Longy School of Music, leads the Klezmer band Shir Chutzpa, and has been a Resident Scholar at the Brandeis Women’s Studies Research Center for 14 years.
Schyler Butler received her BA in English from the University of North Texas. A recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award for FY 2020 and a lead poetry editor for Human/Kind Journal, her work appears in and is forthcoming from African American Review, Writers Resist, Duende, Superstition Review, Obsidian, Heavy Feather Review’s #NoMorePresidents, Kissing Dynamite, and elsewhere, sometimes under the pseudonym “Iyana Sky.” Currently, she lives in Columbus, OH.
Janiru Liyanage is a 15-year-old school student and Pushcart Prize-nominated poet. His re-cent work appears or is forthcoming in [PANK], Frontier Poetry, Wildness Journal, Cordite Poetry Review, The Cardiff Review, Homology Lit, Up The Staircase Quarterly, Boston Ac-cent Lit, The Journal Of Compressed Creative Arts, Ekphrastic Review, Driftwood Press and elsewhere. He serves as a reader for Palette Poetry. He is a two-time winner of the national Dorothea Mackellar Poetry Awards, a recipient of an Ekphrastic Award from the Ekphrastic Review and Sydney finalist of the Australian Poetry Slam. He has appeared on The Project and featured in Namoi Valley Independent, The Minister’s Media Centre, Audition Material Young People among other places. He is a recipient of a UNICAF scholarship for a degree at the University of California Riverside, Liverpool John Moores University, University of Suffolk, University of East London, and Unicaf University. Born as the son of Sinhalese immigrants, he currently lives in Sydney.
Saba Sebhatu was born in Italy and raised in Washington DC where she completed a BA in journalism. She then moved to Eritrea where she began working as a peacebuilding practitioner in conflict resolution initiatives in the Horn of Africa. A previous Callaloo Fellow, her current work focuses on the African Diaspora and their geographies. In Spring 2018 she was selected as a mentee by the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. She is currently pursuing her MFA in nonfiction writing at The New School in New York City.
Kika Dorsey is a poet and fiction writer in Boulder, Colorado, and lives with her two children, husband, and pets. Her books include Beside Herself (Flutter Press, 2010) and three full-length collections, Rust, Coming Up for Air (Word Tech Editions, 2016, 2018), and Occupied: Vienna is a Broken Man and Daughter of Hunger (Pinyon Publishing, 2020). She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize four times. Currently, she is an instructor of English at Front Range Community College and tutors. When not writing or teaching, she swims miles in pools and runs and hikes in the open space of Colorado’s mountains and plains.
