Tegan Murrell
PLASTIC MAUSOLEUM
My parents can’t get rid of their old
answering machine because my sister’s voice
is on the greeting, but they won’t
let the phone go to voicemail because they know
how grief’s atomic
bomb destroys the body.
Maybe they miss lunging out of bed for somebody
in the middle of the night. There is warmth in old
worries. Maybe the thought of her breath’s lost atoms,
fossilized under the dial pad, keeps them from taping her voice
with their cellphones. After all, they know
how transplants can fail, how dangerous it is to want
to travel through time. The teleporter won’t
just appear somewhere else in time, her body
must be rebuilt, the original destroyed. Can she know
the clone her is same as the old?
Does the same squinting laugh, same cartwheeling voice
equal the same mind made up of different atoms?
Aren’t grieving mothers just stacks of atoms?
Do hydrogen and carbon know that my father wants,
more than anything, for that voice
to belong to a body?
New self or old,
I know
there is no
chance atoms
alone could soothe this ancient
ache. Just how the fire won’t,
when it consumes a body,
fully digest the bones, a voice
leaves pieces. Echoing from plastic, her voice
carves that same wound known
from the beginning, the pain Adam
and Eve carried in their bodies
like bitter words that won’t
leave the throat, Old
Testament pain. Her echoing voice has no
body, no atoms,
no want, no growing old.
Tegan Murrell was born in 1999, months before the world failed to end. She graduated from the University of Alabama in 2021 with a Bachelor's and Master's in Mathematics. She is currently working on Plastic Mausoleum, which won an honorable mention for the 2021 Black River Chapbook Prize.