Thrush Poetry Journal
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Kimberly O'Connor 

from Ways to Die: 
                                Matricide

The yoga teacher asks us to sink our bodies
into the earth, and I think of when I would die, 
as though it’s something I was thinking of earlier 
and got sidetracked from, or something I meant 
to think about but forgot. Not how I would die, 
or when I will, but when I would, if I could 
choose. Not fall, which is now, and too predictable, 
or winter, among everything already dead, or spring―
too hard to end in the middle of all that beginning. 
My mother was speaking not of seasons, or not 
of weather anyway, when she said if she knew 
she was getting Alzheimer’s like her mother did, 
she would kill herself if she still had the sense to do it. 
She wants me or my sister to stab her with an overdose 
of insulin or push her wheelchair into a pool 
if it somehow gets past her before she can stop it. 
My sister won’t listen, and I just laugh. We’ll be no help. 
We’re driving when my mother tells me this.
We pass the place where, when she was teaching me 
to drive, I turned left and panicked halfway, let off 
the clutch, and nearly careened into the kudzu-covered, 
sagging building that used to be the post office.
Today it has stormed. The trees are bare. 
The leaves on the asphalt look like dead birds 
trying to reach their wings up to―no, 
the leaves on the asphalt look like dead birds. 
I’d choose mid-summer, hot weather, the kind 
once it arrives you think can never end.




Kimberly O'Connor is the 2013 Alice Maxine Bowie Fellow and a Youth Outreach Instructor for Denver’s Lighthouse Writers Workshop. Her poems have appeared in Colorado Review, Copper Nickel, Hayden’s Ferry Review, storySouth, and elsewhere.




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