your grandfather was this close to God: a eulogy
WRITTEN BY ALICIA HSU
no, he wasn’t. if i squint, i can see through the smoke:
your shadow swallowed shape, shallow withered mouth
hugging a crisp cigarette (do you see in tunnel vision?)
and your hands freckled with the love of a sun you used
to know, but not here. my mother told me that you were
obsessed with black holes and i wonder when you became
one, a solar void on the earth tasked with the mundane,
the restless, the purposeless resisting of my grandmother’s
fish hooks tugging in your peeling skin, your eyes, drooping,
perpetually staring me into the ground. if i squint at the inch
of vacuum space between my mother’s fingers when she
says you were this close to God, i see a casket being
shoveled into the same inferno i threw my paper prayers
into (what did i pray for, then? for you?), but instead of
feeling coals like burning acid through my stomach, i
feel now, like asking you to tell me what it is like
being so close to God.