ANNIVERSARY by Edward Salem

by Edward Salem / Tuesday, 14 November 2023 / Published in ISSUE 28

Kneeling to carve back the grass encroaching
like cuticles on a fingernail, I noticed how close
her flat headstone was to the others around hers.

Watering the flowers at his wife’s grave,
an old man told me they’re placed above
the abdomens, not the heads, as you’d expect.

I think he meant to explain they were less crowded
underground than it appeared, but I didn’t follow.
I pictured a pair of rotten feet standing on my mother’s

head, her green feet standing on another’s head,
and so on in a horizontal grid, gaudy totem poles.
I wasn’t sure what part of her body I stood over,

but I stepped aside as if she could feel my weight,
like when I was a child and she’d lie on the carpet
and tell me to walk all over her back. I’d laugh

at the funny feeling underfoot, the squishy,
bony, fleshy ground I massaged by walking,
losing my wobbly balance turning around

after each short lap from shoulders to butt. Yet
standing off to the side of her grave felt wrong.
Every year, every visit, like the bashing of a gong.

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About Edward Salem

Edward Salem is a 2023 Kresge Artist Fellow in Literary Arts and the recipient of the 2022 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize. He was chosen by Ottessa Moshfegh as the winner of BOMB magazine’s 2021 Fiction Contest and was selected by Louise Glück as a finalist for the 2021 Changes Book Prize. His writing has been published in Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, The Columbia Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Best Debut Short Stories (Catapult), and elsewhere. He is the co-founder and co-director of City of Asylum/Detroit, a nonprofit that provides long-term sanctuary to writers and artists who have been persecuted for their work.