OBIT [Teaching]
—after Victoria Chang

Teaching — dies repeatedly from gunshots
ricocheting off NRA stickers on bumpers
of trucks driven by pro-life people on the
way to church services. Not funerals for
school children, but ordinary Sunday
services where the preacher gives out
thoughts and prayers like communion,
cardboard on tongues, recycled from
cereal boxes bearing Chex a student
hurriedly gulped, washed down with
orange juice/no pulp so he could catch
the bus on time to be murdered before
shaping pottery from clay for Father’s Day,
before enjoying chicken tenders, before
writing 1,000,000 as an exponent in the
upper corner of senseless, before sighing
for poems from Keats who died young too,
before learning that Beethoven, when he
was almost deaf, composed an unsent love
letter to an unknown “Immortal Beloved,”
before learning that the text he wrote
to the cute girl with a K-Pop phone case
and the really white Converse in the front
row was almost like the one Beethoven
wrote, only he is the immortal one now.

By Dana Kinsey

Twitter: @wordsbyDK
Instagram: @dana.kinsey

Editor’s note: This elegy controls the fractured pain of grief via line breaks and imagery until the last line breaks the reader’s heart.