Word Choice features original works of fiction and poetry. Read two poems by Ashley Toliver, with art by KellyAnne Hanrahan, selected by Jozeph Herceg.

A LETTER HOME

I’ve arrived in a new city where nobody’s parents have died.
Family picnics are enormous:
grandmothers knit the dynasty crest into quilts
great grandmothers run across the lawn playing hoop and stick games
the oldest ancestors bash in
the heads of boars for the barbecue and moan together in contentment.
All their children know exactly what to do
and move in endless waltzes.
Here the people speak only in witticisms
and laughter is a form of currency.
They’ve turned the cemetery plots into community pools
and scatter the childless under the trees like family pets.
The new citizens are not callous.
They have built memorials out of timber, soil and fisherman’s nets,
rain-scented body wash and corrugated marble but what always happens next,
a black horse that marches out of their hands and out of their hands
and out of their hands.

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