i.

There were no stained-glass windows in that Mennonite Church. Instead, the windows carried milky, matte-white glass ignoring how vulnerable she really is. One last time her grandmother set out the spoons and cups before lying down to rest her white curls against the pillow. Who will pray for us when all of our grandmothers are dead? she wrote the silent words at the bottom of the funeral programs in ink.

She had never seen anything that used to breathe be everything that it did not want to be.

Think of these windows as our way to share this idea about which we have romanticized when, in fact, we can only make it true in concept and nothing more.

Churches should have, at the very least, opalescent glass in the window frames like the fine china she wasn’t allowed to touch as a child. We award our heirs these sea spray green trinkets to carry from apartment to apartment on their backs to not break a single piece she thought as she packed it all in boxes.

ii.

She and he moved into a building called The World Apartment Complex. They moved into an apartment where the property manager placed a sign outside The World’s gated entryway. They moved into an apartment complex behind a sign which reads: If you lived here, you’d live in the world. They lived in The World and grew used to this as a statement of vacancy.

iii.

She watches the clock in her car and remembers

the one that dusted her with snow from heat

vents when she was trying to warm her hands.

She still has to worry about her fear of driving.

iv.

Despite her beauty, she had very ugly knees.

v.

Every morning he wakes and leaves her to sleep an hour longer. He grabs the green toothbrush from the tumbler glass. Every morning she wakes and ignores the orange toothbrush in the tumbler glass, grabbing the green one. Having realized this, they now use gender specific toothbrushes that makes them feel less than one another. They never tell the other about this feeling.

After a 98-cent composition notebook page full of tally marks

that counted the moments of silence between them, she said:

I want to find somebody so special to bury my ashes on top of.

The last thing she had said to her former lover was through postcard. It read: Having a fine time without you. She signed it simply and with purpose––She.

vi.

The sound of dead

cell phones and empty school buses

filled her quiet living room

that morning. She stood

watching the news

from the TV set in the corner

and brushed her own growing belly.

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