Sunhats For Adults Poem by Michael Ashby

Each of the children
soiled and served
through mud and grass and blue bled sky.
Would you to like see the body?
Snapped in a Polaroid at her open casket funeral?
You need to shake the dead paper
before the ghost can appear again.

No, simply stay arms length.
The opposite crotch carries pox that kill
orphans and firstborns alike.

Long flat hats in the garden,
like saucers and plates that fight their age by transplanting life.
Even now in their old age
they are wary of strangers.
Flicking their wrists to make her appear.

She remembers suits and tears
and her father's hand on her shoulder,
as the plants absorb the liquid and ink
in a photograph buried.