Whitney Vaughan
Funeral Aficionado
It’s something to hope for, that the talk at your wake will crack a rib, it’s so funny. I see you over there. Hoping. Just madly hoping. You practice draping your body across the green, pool-table felt. You practice, also, the rough Irish brogue so thick that it runs down the mountain and smacks straight into song. There are worse things to hope for, like the paper- dry attendance of Episcopalians in black. Or like the brutal gestures of a people hell-bent on a future in white. I see you mapping out your last moment on the canvas like a Pollack or Basquiat. Drool, spit, blood, a useless bone or two to the wolves. And that fucking rimshot eloquence that ensues? It makes the ear deaf, shocks the solar plexus like a roof falling down on tomorrow’s ghost.
Whitney Vaughan is the recent recipient of a fellowship to complete her M.F.A. in Poetry at North Carolina State University, with poets John Balaban and Dorianne Laux. Her poetry has been published in Asheville Poetry Review and XNK. Although she has written for more than half her life, her newfound interest in photography is proving to be a better cash crop than poetry, alas. She resides in Durham, NC, in a seriously slanted apartment.
