Martha Silano: I’m Not So Good at Corpse Pose 

Sitting in lotus position, the yoga teacher reminds us to thank our bodies
for what they’ve just done, half-moon and reverse warrior,
side-angle and downward-facing dog.

We’ve just woken from the dead, having been in deep rest,
when she rouses us with a clanging bell
that sounds Doppler-ish

thanks to unstable WIFI. Shiva Saana. I always try focus on the rain
slapping my studio windows, on a plane about to land at SeaTac,
but I pretty much always can’t

because I’m thinking about the garbage, how I have to collect it
from each little wicker basket, sort it (don’t want
my orange peels ending up in a landfill,

or the toilet paper rolls anywhere but the recycling bin).
The bell is tolling, and I’m supposed
to be reviving myself,

but instead I’ve been lugging the bins to the curb, checking
on the spinach starts, kicking gravel out of the driveway,
back to its home in the cracks along the side porch.

What can I say? I make a pretty bad cadaver? That it will take
turning me into ash or compost to get me to stop obsessing
about the next thing on my list? It’s 7 am,

and already I’ve clocked 45 move minutes on my Apple Watch.
Hurray for me! Now I will find peace beside the space heater
with a cup of turmeric and ginger tea

supposed to help my aching knees. No, I haven’t graduated
to Boddhisatva quite yet. The door’s ajar,
and the cats rush in like the air

through the gap in a door I’ll maybe, at the end, float through,
past the oldest cedars in Seattle, toward the dead who live
inside each eagle invisibly squealing.

Copyright 2024 Martha Silano. First published in Verse Virtual. Included in Vox Populi by permission of the author.

Martha Silano is a writer living with a diagnosis of ALS. She is the author of five full-length poetry collections, all from Saturnalia Books. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Paris Review, The Missouri Review, American Poetry Review, and The Best American Poetry.