This book holds the items for the contest I enter in 2019, 2020, and beyond. |
| There were funerals even then, funerals with open caskets-- displayed upon a stage in the chapel of a mortuary-- waiting for mourners to walk by and cry. We walked past the open casket, and cried or sighed, sometimes saying how life-like the deceased appeared. Some of us cried out of grief or because the body of the deceased appeared to be a wax effigy... devoid of the animating force that gave our loved one life. Poet's Note: ▶︎ |