MACKENZIE BERRY
Ritual of Breathing
My mother works with dying people. She says she can easily
tell, looking in both eyes, who will spend their last nights
scratching, frantically pointing at the corners of the room,
and who will open the door lightly, tilt their heads
and wink just once. She says, near the end, everyone
tugs at their collars, casts their clothes and tries to pull
out of their skins, skeleton and itching. Death, like drugs,
tends to make an honest family, and so they sit in waiting
rooms, saying I never liked her, but it’s nice to see
a wicked woman still. Or, remember all the times
she fought the man for trying to strike us small?
Of course we’re all dying people,
but I mean the ones who have the grace and terror
of knowing what’s nearest. Sometimes, if they have young
children, they make the chaplain, my mother, tell the children
first, how death means the body means nothing anymore,
how what looks like their mother will soon grow far colder.
Other times, if they have old children,
they make the chaplain, my mother, leave, so the children
can crawl in the bed, place their heads on the collarbone,
their feet hanging off the edge. Once a son went
into the bathroom stall and downed a bottle a tequila,
coming out swaying and asking if it was over yet. No,
it’s not over yet. Everything polite dissolves when single
months are left. I always wondered if dying people
cut her off mid-sentence with a head shake if her prayer
didn’t salve because their time was especially
too short for limp letters to God. Mostly,
who would be left to know if she did her job badly? She must
have made a sacred pact with everything grim, swore to usher
every last breath true, if only for her own. She must know, when
the heart stops, the chest bursts upward like a sky split endless.
Mackenzie Berry is a poet from Louisville, Kentucky. Her debut poetry collection is Slack Tongue City (Sundress Publications, April 2022), which includes “Ritual of Breathing”. Her poetry has been published in Poetry Ireland Review, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Hobart, and Blood Orange Review, among others. She received an MFA in Poetry from Cornell University, where she teaches. Her website is mackenzieberry.com.