From the back of the cavernous room, filled with weeping women in black dresses and jackie kennedy veiled hats, whose cigar-smoking husbands lined up against the walls  like  usual suspects, I stood paralyzed, staring down at my patent leather shoes, making the blue rhinestones of my mother's bracelet, sparkle and dance across the funeral home floor. 

No matter how long, or how loudly, Tennessee Ernie Ford echoed "How Great Thou Art" over the loudspeaker, my feet wouldn't move me any closer to my mother's casket.   

Under the harsh and buzzing fluorescent bulbs, i breathed in one long last look, committing the lines of her face to memory, hoping that everyone who came to say goodbye, knew that even after what she did to the baby, she had always tried so hard to shine brightly
in the barely burning light.  

*farmhousefreak 6.10.13*