I made love to a widower who bathed me in cactus and wrapped me up in his dead wife’s robe and asked, if you want a roadmap for a life well-lived, why are you looking here?
— from “I Wake Up This Morning and It’s All Morning to Me”
Life is beautiful and broken and meaningful and restless and death. In a world full of dirt, saliva, and dreams, Beth Gordon’s Morning Walk with Dead Possum, Breakfast and Parallel Universe, looks at life from all angles – including those out-of-body moments when you feel Death but see that you are still alive, still have time, still have so much hurt and confusion.
Gordon’s writing guides the reader through the battles “That children born on the shredded edges of this planet will find within their necessary lives….” This is a diary for many. This is a notice that life is genuinely what you make it, and that if you live it while looking at it, you might miss what is actually in front of you. You might see your emotions from the outside. You might better understand the struggles and shredded edges.
In a time when so many fear the world outside of their house, their body, their life, and where “drowning doesn’t look like drowning,” and people “listen for the monster-found scream / and thrashing of arms and legs but instead the two-year-old simply sinks like alligator bait while her parents are mixing the perfect margarita on an ordinary afternoon in may,” we wait for a morning walk to become a mourning walk.
Purchase Morning Walk with Dead Possum, Breakfast and Parallel Universe