The Job

You go your whole life believing

dying is the easy part, then one day

your great aunt gets a brain tumour the size of a

kumquat burrowing inside her hippocampus, and 

you watch her suffocate for hours before passing. 

In the hospital, in her last moments, she tells you, 

between spoonfuls of room-temperature baby corn, 

Dying is a thankless job. What a line, you think, and you 

write it down on your phone. Dying is a thankless job. 

You leave her room without wiping the corn stuck 

to the corners of her lips she cannot reach. Her striped 

pink towel, folded over a leather chair by the door. 

Her wrists, suspended in a froth of August sunlight. 

Her beeping, fading behind you as you walk down 

the hallway, trying out the line on other grieving 

patients. Dying is a thankless job. Mostly, they don’t react,

but you learn that all the doctors here use fruits

as metaphors for growths: this lump in your breast

is as big as a grape, this cyst in your stomach, 

an apple. You think this is the wrong crowd 

for the line. You just haven’t found your 

people yet. Dying is a thankless job. You will 

use that line in a poem one day–– one where 

you will not acknowledge your great aunt. One

where you will not need grief to make the poem

work. One you will write when you are finally living 

your quiet, uneventful, upper-middle-class suburban life,

where you set lillies in lusterware vases all afternoon.

Where you make a fruit salad for your two perfect 

children, pack it into two green plastic boxes, take them 

out for a picnic, yelling cows as you pass cows, driving 

for hours past endless rows of powerlines jewelled in rain, 

until you find an orchard where you can finally sit and 

write while your children run through acres of fig trees, 

picking the fruit with their hands, forgetting the salad you 

worked so hard on, rotting in their bags. How much

sweeter the figs taste because they aren’t for them.