Jeremiah Moriarty

Season 6

When her friends brought her back from the dead,
Buffy had no words for heaven and hell—just hands

clawing desperately through root systems. It was 2001 and
I laid in bed thinking what it would mean

to wake up in a box, be strong enough
to break it. When she wandered home from the grave,

her sister Dawn washed her face. On our side, Meg and I
watched from our parents’ bed, the flickering Toshiba 

a window. A warm cloth. I had this terrible pang of
I-don’t-know-what, because I never wanted Meg to go

down and away, not like that, not grave, and
if she ever went away, I knew upon her return

I would help wash her face.

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Jeremiah Moriarty is a queer writer from Minneapolis. His poems and stories have appeared in The Rumpus, Puerto del Sol, No Tokens, Catapult, The Cortland Review and elsewhere.