If I Had My Urn
- Sep 16, 2020
- 2 min read
by Nicholas Holt
Someone once said that we write poetry because we die before we get to play with our own ashes. That person was me, just now, and I said it because there are lots of fun things that I would do with my ashes: like, “hello barista, I like your cool beret, and that’s a nice mustache too, say, would you mind making me a latte with my own space grey espresso grounds? Just scoop it from this urn, here,” and if I had that urn, I’d find a kid from Florida and show him how to pack a snowball. I’d replace the Thanksgiving football and let the uncles and toddlers sling TD’s while my urn belched out dude-sand like a coughing bus in dystopian Chicago. If I had my urn I’d die again, but maybe sexy this time, like choking on the sugarcubes of someone’s candy underwear, because I don’t know why my mother picked an urn that looks like the macguffin in a museum heist movie. My personal- powder is not worth contorting through a playground of lasers, and plus, if you steal me, I’ll do two of two things: one, I’ll sit on your couch and cry over the lost ingredients on cooking shows to get you to hold me, or two, I’ll spill all over your keyboard, and every single time you Google football statistics, you’ll touch me. Either way, I win. If I had my urn, I’d sneak into teen parties and mix my boy-sand with illegally purchased cigarettes and tell all of their mothers. If I had my urn, I’d become the pyrotechnic letters in a driveway left for a lover by someone who will soon learn about heartbreak — that it’s sandy jell-o served on a bone- white hospital dish that you eat after surgery, or a grimoire in a warlock’s library that falls off of the shelf and displays a spell that makes the target forget how to sleep — if I had my urn, I’d dump my contents into a cement mixer and mingle with the concrete, and if I were alive, I’d buy a phone and call the city to patch up the pothole in front of your driveway, so every morning when you went to work you wouldn’t have to worry about losing your bumper, held together with ripcord and a yellow sticker that warns everyone behind you that they should never get too close.
Nicholas Holt has a B.A. in Creative Writing from Florida State University. He is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets award. His work has been featured in or is forthcoming from The Kudzu Review, The Shore, Peatsmoke, and Okay Donkey.
