“Speak Ill of the Dead,” “You Are Still Seventeen” & “A Very Small Wish” by Irene Hou

Speak Ill of the Dead

when you died I took a shower and laid face-down at the drain,
half-scrubbed skin on my tongue, tasting crumbs half-erased.
no one knows you tasted like snot when we first kissed, clear and sick down the top lip,
swallowing bar soap water, bitter and dry, becoming a dot in the bath, swirling into the pipes. I
spend the night beneath your floating face—is it real, are you real, is it real—when to wake and
when to sleep—fail your classes, learn to lose, kip at the foot of the bed where I can’t smell the
last of your breath—no one knows, I attend no funeral, I have no photos, I am the last between
us, I can’t believe you’ve made me remember our worst kiss alone

You Are Still Seventeen

I fly five hundred miles to see a stranger. The drugstore irises I buy kill themselves in two days

though it drizzled, mud puddling, in carved name—

drenched in sun, they shiver, on your unknown grave.


I’ve come to blow the ants from your vase, where they fall my thumb crushes, indiscriminate.

I imagine beetles boring to your wet tongue,

I imagine your last words until they are gone.


I’m laid in a desert of little white teeth, sweeping away coin corpses as I sleep,

as if at death I keep you clean,

as if at death you see me.

A Very Small Wish

I have collected blue sky for a year,
squares of cut cloth, pale, painted clouds
interspersed with cat pics & pretty plants
a sweater I saw once I think you would like.
when I die, I will bring my phone with me
to show you what you have missed
it is a quilt of photos I have stitched
and we can scroll through my life then, like this.

Tags: irene hou, izzy true