March 2nd at the Cadaver
On your birthday in ninety-four years,
I will have been six-feet-under for a week.
My skin will start to slack around my
knuckles tired from stretching over the bumps
and twisting into my palms.
My fingernails will, at last, grow long—racing
to introduce themselves to the piglets, try the famed
roast beef—unhindered by my teeth, the maggots’
newest xylophone—they jam on Thursday nights,
if you still need a party venue.
My bones will stop their creaking, my ears will
fill with dirt, except for the hole where you
saw the needle go through when we were only
fourteen—the skin now repurposed as a
sweatband for an aspiring slug athlete—my
brain will turn to delicious dark mush, best
served hot.
My eyes will be the drive-in movie
theater flashing the whole of my life at the
Sunday matinee.
My vagina will house the worms in her
O’Keeffe folds—keep them warm, keep
them company with the stories of all the
lovers—their coffee breath and mediocre
taste in feminist theory.
My heart—the restless servant—will get to kick up her
feet and get around to that Patterson novel, find out if
thrillers are her thing.
Kate Soupiset is a first-year English/Creative Writing major at DePaul University. She grew up in San Antonio, TX, and published her first collection of poetry, False Anatomy, in April 2019.