Button Your Shirt Before You Go.

Button Your Shirt
Before You Go
(for Reetika)

   Dead woman loving him
   from her grave.
   Is this the end of love?

   In the weeks after her funeral
   he would lie across his Bed like
   a dean shirt that had fallen from
   a hanger in the back of a closet.

   Even after he learns about her death.
   when he knows she is not home or
   maybe not in the mood to talk,
   he calls on her phone to listen to her voice
   on the answering machine
   reminding him to leave a message.

   Tonight he undresses and decides
   to love the dead.
   He walks across the
   her book from the

   On every page a suicide note.
   On every page a lullaby.

E. Ethelbert Miller's most recent publication is How Sleep on the Nights We Don't Make Love