Muertos

Mitchell Nobis

Daddy will you come to 
my party when I die?  
he said. 
Um...what? 
I said. 
My— what do you call  
it—funeral? 
Will you come to that? 
he said. 
Bub, you’re going to live 
to be an old man & 
I’ll be long gone by then, 
I said through my  
throat full of scarabs. 
No, I want you to live 
to be 80 million years old, 
he said.  

We paused & no one  
spoke while we let an 
Isbell song about loss slide 
out the radio and 
waited for my wife to 
come out of the bakery 
with a cake.  
We watched the rain 
stream down the car 
windows. Two miles away 
we were an hour late to a 
birthday party.  
From the womb of the car, 
we watched the suburbs  
chew up everything  
outside. 

Will you come back for 
the Day of the Dead at least? 
he said. 
You bet,  
I said. 
Yo espero que sí. 

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Author Commentary: Though my family has no cultural connection to Día de los Muertos, this scene happened a day or so after my boys learned about the holiday. While we adults bog ourselves down in mundanity, kids keep an eye on the only questions really worth talking about. I prefer their questions. 

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Mitchell Nobis is a writer, teacher, and transplanted farmboy in Metro Detroit where he lives with his family. His poetry has appeared in Exposition Review, Hobart, Dunes Review, Sunspot, and others. His manuscript was a runner-up for The 2019 Hopper Poetry Prize. Find him at @MitchNobis or mitchnobis.com.