Manual For Bereavement Clearances
There’ll be Bibles. Multiple Bibles.
Mementoes of a porcelain era:
plates and china, knives and forks
in Sheffield-stickered boxes.
Decide if the dead are at rest.
Talk to them, the previous inhabitants,
justify your presence: hands in drawers,
bum on their flammable couch.
Prepare for death’s paraphernalia,
the gloved tasks: soiled mattresses,
Ensures past their use-by dates,
yellow pillows hoarding spitty tissues.
Steel yourself for jars of poison, locks
(for something gone), images
that trail you home: the snapped trap
clutching a fine tail bone.
Kitty Donnelly has two collections of poetry published by Indigo Dreams Kitty Donnelly (indigodreamspublishing.com). She won a Creative Future Award in 2019 and was Nominated for Jerwood Compton Fellowship in 2021. In 2023 she won the Hammond House International Literary Prize (poetry).