waiting room poem

He was in town visiting for a long weekend.

I told him he didn’t need to come to the monthly doctor’s appointment with me;
waiting would be like the movies,
all of us singing to ourselves
and shaking our heads and feet.

He grabbed his book and said, I love to dance.

DEATH TEXT

– after Book of the Dead for the Chantress of Amun Nauny
            and the Pearl Jam cocktail at The Ball & Biscuit

at a lounge bar in Indianapolis
we rehash our recent breakups 

the past persons sent weighty texts
during the darkest part of departing

            a mother died, no one cares 
            a daughter died, no one cares 

I tell him about the MET Museum
about a scroll that details next steps

what to do when someone you love dies 
storying how to move on to the afterlife

            breathed relief into our potions 
listened            in         aspirational     awe 

he hands me a Bible to make use of
I peel out the pages to make more use of

*

Kristine Esser Slentz is a queer writer of Maltese descent, raised in the Chicagoland area. A cult escapee and GED holder, she is the author of EXHIBIT: an amended woman, depose (FlowerSong Press, 2021, 2024) and the forthcoming collection face-to-faces (ThirtyWest Publishing House, 2026). A TEDx participant and regular contributor to The Saturday Evening Post, her work has also appeared in TriQuarterly, Five Points, and elsewhere. KRISTINE is the co-founder, organizer, and host of Adverse Abstraction, a monthly experimental artist series in New York City’s East Village. She also produces and performs in Verse & Vision, a stage production currently in a micro-residency at NYC’s DADA, and that has just completed a second run at the IndyFringe Festival. Follow her art on Substack at Carnations & Car Crashes.