Stonecoast Review
The Literary Journal of the Stonecoast MFA
Brother in the Bardo
By Cynthia Bargar
You on your porch-perch lookout, Quincy Bay
& what will they do with your eyes, blue-green-grey
like mine & don’t tell me they scoop them with a spoon.
Your undertaker, herding me to the special room—
it couldn’t be helped—unctuous. What does he know of you,
of us, of Solomon Burke? He didn’t watch you
piano your way through life. Never heard you.
Christ on the cross! Who appointed him bardo
commander? An eclipse of sphinx moths would like to know.
CYNTHIA BARGAR, associate poetry editor at Pangyrus, is the author of Sleeping in the Dead Girl’s Room, selected as a Massachusetts Book Awards 2023 Honor Book. Her poems have appeared/are forthcoming in many journals and in Our Provincetown: Intimate Portraits by Barbara E. Cohen. Cynthia lives in Provincetown, Massachusetts. She can be found online at facebook.com/cynthia.bargar.3/ and insta @cbargar.
This poem originally appeared in Stonecoast Review Issue 21.
Photo by Jens Aber
