In the Room After Death
Everything is whole
and unfinished at once,
nothing is owed
beyond the body
of the moment,
its exact geometry
and sensitive skin
as we sit over
her tented bones
air still and overripe,
blue flesh fruited and
gone to husk
until death’s men
zip her into a red vinyl sack
and wheel it away,
her white dog biting
at their heels.
Scratch
True dawn, blue air
bent and shimmering
around the shape of
the recently dead
while I ghost around
making lists, watching
asparagus go to spire
from the window and I
do not miss the body
in the bell-rung field,
all my skin listening
for how to know the earth
from scratch, as in sleep
everything is lost
and learned again
on waking: first flight of a
house sparrow in a world
that does not contain her.
Click here to read Kathryn Napier Stull on the origin of the poems.
Image by Artem Lozina on unsplash.com, licensed under CC 2.0.
Kathryn Napier Stull:
These two poems reflect the suspension, stillness, and disorientation I felt in the aftermath of my mother’s death. In “In the Room After Death,” I’m sitting inside the strangeness and precision of the first hours, when for a brief time there was a sense of completion, of total presence with death and its details, alongside an awareness that there were many, many things to do and understand – but not yet. I’d never had that layered sensation before.
And in “Scratch,” I wanted to communicate the way it felt to float around in the physical and figurative space after death, how that unknown air felt on the skin and in the body. There was a weird newborn feeling before grief came, when it was too early even to miss her, and I was hyper-aware of the sense that I’d never been alive – or done anything, big or small – in that particular, freshly-created world before. I looked up backyard birds of Maryland to figure out who else might be taking its very first flight in this newest world that was missing one local mother.
Kathryn Napier Stull grew up in Washington, D.C. and holds an MFA from Mills College. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in River Heron Review, Failbetter, Scrivener Creative Review, the anthology Sierra Songs and Descants, and elsewhere. She is the winner of the 2026 Free Verse Poetry Award from Bacopa Literary Review and is currently at work on a collection of poems about death and the dreaming body. Find her at kathrynnapierstull.com.
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