My mother doesn’t want a headstone;
she wants to be cremated

and could I please scatter her ashes
somewhere in Lake Michigan.

My father wants to be returned to the land,
the earth—not in one place but many,

the way seeds disperse in the wind
hoping to find a place to grow.

As if I ever had a place to go,
a body to call home that wasn’t a foraging—

as if I were not alone in the dark
watching the headlights of someone passing through,

solitary in the quiet,
the moonlight bleeding through the window.