My job is to fill people up, he says. His job is to make people cry. To stand at his pulpit and gesture / past the crowd of faces who fill black, soggy napkins with tears and cup their hands—fingers intertwined and palms upturned—in their laps / toward a box or an urn or a photo. As he gestures toward the box or the urn or the photo, he gestures / toward some color of life / lived, some cup those filling their napkins with tears have filled, at some point in their life, with life and love and tears. I’m very happy! / he swears, defending his employment. There’s a goodness in grief—a deep orange heat that warms through sorrow’s silly winter. It’s not like he knows / the one toward which he gestures, the people he must make weep. Just the weight of relief they lift / from their hearts to place upon his, how it sits like a tooth / on a perfectly green grape. It’s almost like you knew him, they say and as they gesture / their lips toward the tips of their eyes—melancholy-red—before they go / before the box or the urn or the photo to dribble a wet prayer / that collects in the bowl of their woven, grinning hands.
Andrew Walker is a writer from Colorado living in Michigan. Their creative work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Black Warrior Review, Ninth Letter, Alien Magazine, Pidgeonholes, HAD, and elsewhere. They are an associate editor at Passages North. Find more of their work at druwalker.com.
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