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published November 2009

David Shumate is the author of High Water Mark (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004), winner of the 2003 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, and The Floating Bridge (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008.) His poetry has appeared widely in literary journals and has been anthologized in The Writer’s Almanac, Good Poems for Hard Times and The Best American Poetry 2007. He is the recipient of a 2009 NEA Poetry Fellowship. He teaches at Marian University in Indianapolis and lives in Zionsville, Indiana.

Suicide

by

Each week in the obit­u­ar­ies you read about a few more. Though they don’t men­tion how the woman weary of this world walked into the mor­tu­ary, sat in a wing-backed chair, pulled a revolver from her purse and dis­charged a bul­let into her tem­ple to ease the bur­den on her fam­ily. Or how the farmer har­vested his soy­beans, spit three times on the ground, then ran his trac­tor over the cliff the day the loans came due. Or how the divorced fly fish­er­man let his waders fill with water and pull him down­stream as if he were just another trout. Then there are all those legends—the washed-up relief pitcher who threw a curve ball so it would tail back around like a boomerang and knock him in the head. The teacher who swal­lowed an over­dose of arith­metic and scram­bled the cir­cuits in his brain. I’m told that in the far east, the despon­dent end it all just by think­ing a few for­bid­den thoughts. Though I won’t repeat those toxic syl­la­bles here. In case some frag­ile soul is read­ing this, look­ing for an easy way to end his pain.

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