In the First Row of the National Cathedral

A week after his departure, she sits on the aisle,
so everyone who eulogizes can reach her hand
after descending the marble steps, nod in sync
with her pillboxed head, as the choir sings
“The Battle Hymn’s” second verse.

No matter how many times she bows her chin,
turns to cheek a well-wisher’s lips, tears up
during a reading from Corinthians, that hat—
black, inlayed, its gentle leaves beginning to vine
down her neck—does not budge, so stubborn
the securing pins are to her scalp, her stoicism.
She doesn’t even recall dressing for today, who
suggested the hat, its asymmetry and distraction.

Still, how fitting it would be, she thinks, if he could
unfasten it now, a Chantilly Frisbee he could pilot
toward the tabernacle, spontaneous, charming,
so soon, from the pews all would rise in a long-armed
wave like at the baseball game, his laughs escaping
from the mahogany casket and bouncing along
the grand chamber.

Hours from now, when relatives have turned on
the college game and encouraged her to eat
a room-service sandwich, she will excuse herself
to draw a bath, disrobe, the week a black mound
in the room’s corner, and she will try to break free,
fingering the hat pins, her head—shaking back,
left, up, again—trying, too, all while she lowers
into the filling water, wishing her fingers
teeth— 

his teeth that bit open the Mae West jacket
after his Skyhawk was shot down, his arms
and leg too fractured to assist, those teeth 

     preserving his life and rising him to the water’s
     surface,

those teeth that could rip the hat in one motion,
      smile at her relief, mouth her name one last
      time, those teeth

her pruning fingers float out of the water for, past
      the void on her head, and into his air.

Amy Lerman teaches in the English department at Mesa Community College. Her poems have appeared or will appear in The Gila River Review; ABZ: A New Magazine of Poetry; Generations: A Journal of Ideas and Images; Garbanzo Literary Journal; Prime Number Magazine; Euphony; Stories That Need to Be Told; Irises: The University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize 2017; Solstice Literary Magazine; Smartish Pace; Rattle; Common Ground Review; Ember Chasm; Slippery Elm; Clementine Unbound; Vallum; Snapdragon; High Shelf; Ghost City Review; Passengers; Red Eft Review; and Radar Poetry. She won 2nd Place in the 2014 Prime Number Magazine Award for Poetry, won the 2015 Art Young Memorial Award for Poetry, received an honorable mention in Glimmer Train's February 2015 Short Story Award for New Writers and Stories That Need to Be Told 2018, and was a finalist in poetry for the 2019 and 2017 Princemere Poetry Prizes, The Tucson Festival of Books Literary Awards, 2018 and 2019 Erskine J. Poetry Prize. When not teaching (or writing or submitting), she enjoys running, traveling, and hanging with her husband, cats, and family.