Phil’s Funeral

Samantha Boswell

for WCH

Aunty Pru says she didn’t go to university so she could wash other people’s laundry. While learning Mandarin and collecting bowties, Uncle Graham insists he’s yet to achieve his full potential. Your mother would pronounce vice versa with hard-K sounds, as Vicki Verka—malaprop pinup—a matriarch crusader. According to you, there are ways of being and doing that make no appearance in your book. Long ago, your father Phil held that first rains fell in Perth by Easter, but there’s no sign now until May. Cousin Kit, fancier of sheer blouses and magenta bras, FB scrounges for a rug she reckons will fix Cousin Lauren’s rental. Admiring your beard to a point which tacks towards irony, Cousin Aaron wonders if, like him, you are a man of seductive slides. Cousin Stanley becomes an engineer, and his brother Michael, serious as a groom, apprentices to heavy mechanics. They both keep silent, listening, watchful. Uncle John fails with group email approaches after ploughing the Big-C. A parse.
Your dad opts for surgery, loses half a lung. He still sneaks the rollies. Trundles an oxygen tank like a wayward suitcase. Consumes $19000 in hospital fees. Dies. Pru, Graham, your mother, you, and all the cousins are there waving Phil off, Pharaonic in the tail of the hearse. Not John. Isn’t invited.

SAMANTHA BOSWELL lives on a 100-year flood plain in Boorloo/ Perth, Western Australia. Her work appears in anthologies and journals, including Creatrix 64, Cuttlefish: Western Australian Poets, Every colour but blue, Going Down South, Rough Diamond Poetry, and Westerly.