an ekphrastic response to Frida Kahlo’s "Thinking About Death"

Lately I have been thinking about death
so often my mind is littered with skulls 
and bones, not the gimmicks of Halloween
décor aisles I so frequently roam, but a pile
that has grown to make landfills unsubstantial. 
I trip over them often—a humerus here, tibia there—
when I am stirring the morning coffee, or staring
at the ceiling so long the spot above my bed is about to ask 
what we are. Or, today, when a member of my childhood-defining boyband fell off a balcony to extinction.

I cannot leave enough flowers on the tombstones 
of my hippocampus for all the people I love
who have gone, for the people yet to go, the many ways
I imagine their leaving, the ways I imagine my own, lest
the fragrant blooms suffocate the amygdala, barricade
all escape routes. If I did try my hand at beautification,
perhaps I could proclaim my mind is a garden!
but swiftly the petals would wrinkle and wilt,
trespassing the railing of their stem. 

And if I could excavate these ruins, evict 
the bones for good, the bulldozer would push 
its plow against my tongue until the rubble spewed
out in broken syllables of the words I do not know 
how to say, the groundwater my overflow of tears. 
And I would be grateful for the release, until 
the next layer of soil was unearthed, where more bones 
make themselves known, the way death visits in excess
boasting its knack for the element of surprise.

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