Alexandra Burack
REMEMBERING JOHN LENNON
I heard he called her name and she held
his hand before the rush to the hospital.
I wonder if he sang, if he knew
there’d be a next song so long without
her, like the one on the radio now, searing
42 years offshore from death--
which makes me envision that last
emergency room moment when you cannot
abide the word gone, only lost or anguished,
as I did, remembering my perished father,
debating if the fall after gunshot feels
the same as flight from a car’s impact,
which kind of death would be kinder: a bullet
close range, or an asphalt slam, sweetening
night with the tinny smell of blood. But these,
of course, are the equivalencies of grief,
when an old young voice makes him die
every time you play the song, or
restores him in one of those flashes
just before sleep.
I heard he called her name and she held
his hand before the rush to the hospital.
I wonder if he sang, if he knew
there’d be a next song so long without
her, like the one on the radio now, searing
42 years offshore from death--
which makes me envision that last
emergency room moment when you cannot
abide the word gone, only lost or anguished,
as I did, remembering my perished father,
debating if the fall after gunshot feels
the same as flight from a car’s impact,
which kind of death would be kinder: a bullet
close range, or an asphalt slam, sweetening
night with the tinny smell of blood. But these,
of course, are the equivalencies of grief,
when an old young voice makes him die
every time you play the song, or
restores him in one of those flashes
just before sleep.
Alexandra Burack earned the MFA at Sarah Lawrence College, where she initiated Lumina and served as its inaugural Editor. She is a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and author of a chapbook, On the Verge (Plinth Books). Her poems have appeared in Ontario Review, Chelsea, Flyway, Tar River Poetry, Northeast Corridor, and CT River Review, and she writes about fiction for Late Last Night Books Blog. She was Co-Founder/Editor of Invert and Guest Editor of The Bound Spiral in the U.K., where she helped found National Poetry Day/London with the Blue Nose Poets Collective. A freelance editor of creative and scholarly manuscripts, she currently teaches as Adjunct Professor of Creative Writing at Chandler-Gilbert Community College (AZ).