by Sophie Klahr
Remember the bats who died of too much
interrupted sleep? Human-borne disease
kept them up at night: the troubled breathing,
a mouth that itched. Enough, my mother said,
when yet another story of my grief
for one animal or another took
over the kitchen—she was just trying
to sit and read the newspaper. She’d read
aloud some awful stuff—a bombed-out mosque,
a law to protect trans kids overturned.
Enough, I’d say. In the past, we always
disagreed on which heartache we should share.
Today, in the sunny kitchen, she shares
her living will. We read it together.
Sophie Klahr is the author of Two Open Doors in a Field (University of Nebraska Press) and Meet Me Here at Dawn (YesYes Books), and co-author of There Is Only One Ghost in the World (Fiction Collective Two), which won the Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Contest. Her writing appears in The New Yorker and elsewhere. A listing of online classes and literary services can be found at sophieklahr.com. She lives in Los Angeles.
