Your Release by Kaitlin Dyer
Do you see him: loving himself so much he hosts within himself more
Your Release
by Kaitlin Dyer
The most adult thing I’ve ever done, my sister- in-law sighs, is filling out paperwork for the baby. Seated on the porch in October, the San Diego heat exhales through the palm trees, the palms of our hands. An hour prior, I signed his DNR. My father, bursting and broken from the growth in his cells. Do you see him: loving himself so much he hosts within himself more, breeding tumors fruitfully as if he were an orchard. I never thought I’d read my own name on a death certificate, but there it is: Informant. Other words I use now he’s dead: snitch, nark, rat. Indeed, I crept through life straddling shadows, for fear, someone might flip a light on and catch me chewing our foundations to dust. Death, a doll house waiting to be played with, but where are the clean sheets? What do we string on the line for all the neighbors to see?
First published in Witness - Black Mountain Institute, Vol. 38 (1). 2025
This line sitting innocently in the middle of this poem:
“Do you see him: loving himself
so much he hosts within himself more, breeding
tumors fruitfully as if he were an orchard”
Some gems in this poem by Kaitlin Dyer...'breeding tumourd fruitfully as if he were an orchard'
'Death, a doll house waiting to be played with, but where are the clean sheets? ' How good, how terrifying is that line.