Tiny Houses for the Dead: poems by Liz Abrams-Morley. Number 8 in Volume Six of our Editor’s Series.
[ cover artwork by the author ]
Publication: November 11, 2026 [100 copies]
27 pages
ISBN 978-1-960693-41-9
$ 12.00
Liz Abrams-Morley‘s collection, Because Time, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2024. Other collections include Beholder, 2018, Inventory, 2014, and a full-length collection, Necessary Turns (Word Tech/Word Communications, 2010), winner of an Eric Hoffer Award for Excellence in Small Press Publishing/Poetry. In 2020, Abrams-Morley was named Passager Poet of the year in Passager Journal’s annual contest. Her poems and short stories have been published widely in journals, anthologies and ezines, and have been read on NPR. Liz has collaborated with visual artists on artist books and art installations that incorporate poetry. She co-authored a text for teachers on the use of poetry and book arts in the K-12 classroom. In recent years, she has been working as a collage artist and incorporating her poetry into visual art pieces. Please visit her on the web at lizabramsmorley.com
Carapace
Even as, each day 500 million cells drop away,
in four weeks—a whole new you holding you together,
though now that you are nearly as old as your mother
ever became, maybe regrowth comes a little more
slowly. Your mother’s skin is beautiful,
the ICU nurse said, Look at that face, not one worry line,
while you watched her hands pick wildly through fitful sleep
at the alternating IV lines feeding her—now water,
now poison—those fingers picking and pulling,
unknowing, the way your sister’s fingers
used to wander to her own scalp while you watched
tv and she yanked, shaft by shaft, one hair after
another until she created a pink, soft-shelled crabbed
patch on the back of her ten-year-old scalp.
The scalp looked so vulnerable, though
20 to 30 layers of dead cells apparently hang
around, blanket what’s growing beneath until
fresh skin is ready to push to the surface.
A carapace, you think now, remembering how
that nurse admired the way life had etched so little
on your mother’s shell. (If the eye is the window
to the soul, was the bone china white of that eyelid
of hers a curtain?)
I have my father’s skin, I tell the dermatologist
as she excises a second melanoma,
offers a plastics guy I refuse—
just for the lines all the cuts have left—
a basal cell scraped here, and here,
and already years ago, here.
And you see your mother, all she held deep
in her skeleton maybe, those anxiously
picking fingers: Hands of a woman half her age,
the nurse said as those hands let go, but no.
You were half your mother’s
age, the hand you reached out to still
hers already showing tiny fissures,
the obvious blots your father wore.
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