My Brother's Poems Arrived After His Funeral
A journal accepted him two weeks too late, and we celebrated anyway.
The acceptance email arrived on a Tuesday, twelve days after we buried him. I know because I was the one keeping his phone charged, a job I had assigned myself for no reason I could defend, and it lit up on the kitchen counter while my mother was washing dishes that were already clean.
Dear Dev, it said. Thank you for sending us your work. We would be delighted to publish three of your poems in our autumn issue.
Delighted. I stood there holding my dead brother's phone and read the word delighted... maybe forty times.
You need to understand what this email would have meant to him alive. Dev had been submitting poems for eleven years. Eleven years of thin envelopes and form rejections, of journals that took nine months to say no and journals that never said anything at all. He kept every rejection in a folder on his laptop labeled, in typical Dev fashion, EVIDENCE. Evidence of what, I asked him once. He said... depends how the story ends.
He drove a delivery van in the daytime and wrote at night at a desk he had built from a door and two filing cabinets. He was thirty six. The aneurysm took him between one breath and the next, on a Sunday, while he was rinsing a coffee mug. The mug survived. I find that detail unforgivable.
At the funeral, our uncle gave a eulogy that mentioned the van and the softball league and Dev's terrible, beloved dog, and did not mention the poems once. Not out of cruelty. Most of the family simply did not know. That was the thing about my brother: he sent his work to strangers in other cities and hid it from everyone who shared his blood. When I asked him why, years ago, he shrugged and said family reads with their thumbs on the scale.
So the email on the counter was a problem, because I was now the only living person who knew what it meant.
I told my mother that night. I read it to her out loud, twice, and explained what the journal was, that it was real, that people Dev admired had been printed in its pages. My mother dried her hands very slowly and said, well... Then she said, write back and tell them yes.
Here is where I have to confess something.
My first instinct was to lie.
To answer as Dev, keep him alive in one inbox in the world, let the poems come out under the name of a living man. I drafted that email. I had my thumb over send. What stopped me was not ethics, it was his voice in my head saying thumbs on the scale, and I understood that the scale works both ways. He would not want pity standing anywhere near his poems, but he would want the truth standing next to them even less comfortably than that. The truth was now part of the work.
So I wrote to the editor as myself. I said my brother had died twelve days before her email arrived, that her journal had been on a list he kept taped above his desk, that the family would be honored if the acceptance still stood. I did not sleep before she answered.
She answered in four hours.
She said the acceptance stood. She said, and I have this email printed and framed, we accepted the poems, not the poet's future, and the poems are alive.
We accepted the poems, not the poet's future, and the poems are alive.
The issue came out in October. Contributor copies arrived in a padded envelope addressed to the estate of Dev Sharma, which broke me in the mailroom of my building in front of a stranger and her groceries. There were two copies. His poems were on pages forty one, forty two, and forty three, under a small italic note that said the poet passed away shortly after these poems were accepted. Shortly before, actually, but I have decided to let the journal have its mercy.
We celebrated anyway. That was my mother's word, anyway, and she said it like a dare. She made his favorite dinner, the lemon chicken he requested every birthday of his life, and we drove to the cemetery with the food in foil and one copy of the journal and a folding table, because my mother does not picnic on the ground. It was cold. My aunt read the first poem, the one about our father's hands. My mother read the second, about the delivery van at dawn, and got through it... which is more than I can say for the rest of us. I read the third one.
The third one was about me.
I did not know until I was three lines in, out loud, at his grave. It never says my name. It is about a boy teaching his little brother to float in a public pool, the older boy's hand under the younger one's back, and the moment the hand pulls away and the younger one keeps floating and does not notice for a whole minute that he is doing it alone. Dev never taught me to swim. He taught me to float, the summer I was seven, exactly like that. I had forgotten the hand pulling away. He had not.
Poets will tell you publication changes nothing. Poets are lying, or they have never watched their mother read her dead son's words in a magazine that strangers pay money for. Something in her sat up straighter that day and has not slouched since. She bought eleven more copies and mails them to people who disappoint her.
In the months after, I went looking for what else he had hidden. His laptop gave up the EVIDENCE folder, two hundred and forty one rejections, and beside it a folder called OUT, poems still waiting at journals that did not know they were reading a dead man. One by one the answers trickled back over the winter. Four more acceptances. Four. My brother had the best publishing year of his life in the year after it ended, and I have laughed about that in rooms where laughing was not appropriate.
I have also, slowly, become the person he never let himself be, the one who talks about it. I found an essay on why safe poems lose and recognized my brother in every paragraph, a man who spent a decade being brave on paper and shy everywhere else. I started reading profiles of writers nobody had heard yet and thinking, one line each, that could have been him... that could have been him. And when the estate paperwork finally closed, I did the thing that scared me most: I picked three of my own poems, poems with my thumb nowhere near the scale, and sent them into a monthly contest the way he would have, without telling anyone in my family.
Rejected. All three.
I put the email in a folder called EVIDENCE.
Depends how the story ends, he said. Here is how it ends for now.
Above my desk, which is a door on two filing cabinets, because of course it is, there hangs one page torn respectfully from a journal, page forty three, a boy floating alone in a public pool and not knowing it. Every so often the radiator stirs the paper and the boy moves, just slightly, like water is under him still. I like to think the hand is somewhere close. I like to think it never went far.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.