brunch with a neighbor​

Issue 16

ninety-nine years and ten months
give you the right to make jokes
about how you won’t live long
enough to benefit from that home
insurance policy you just renewed,
and that your yellow back lawn will
be someone else’s problem soon;
 
but lacking that same length of life
I doubt I have the right to laugh with
you and I’m struck by the same sense of
impropriety I feel whenever I don’t
see you for a few days and I wonder
if you’re dead; because we both silently
know that one of these mornings I will
 
call your landline—the last one in existence
I know of—and you won’t answer--
I will be greeted by an electronic echo of
your shaking voice that will no longer
share endless stories of golf and
your nursing career and the million
friends I can’t keep straight; but somehow
 
this truth is only yours to speak and
I can’t utter the word death in your presence--
probably because I fear that day when
I will sense the weight of your absence
from down the street, and the three percent
of your life that has overlapped with mine
will be concluded; so I just nod seriously
and say that at least your insurance policy
will give you peace of mind, and you
concede that’s true

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Sharisa Aidukaitis is a writer and college educator in upstate New York. Her poems have appeared in numerous print and online journals, including Penstricken, Moss Piglet, The Quarter(ly), Drifting Sands Haibun, Sublimation, and others.

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