Funeral Planning with Phyllis by Sharon Waller Knutson

The way she crosses
out certain survivors
and puts them under
who preceded her in death
in her obituary,

and replaces names of dead
eulogy and prayer reciters
and hymn organ players
with the living in the program
she types on her Underwood,

we figure she started planning
every detail of her funeral
after she almost bled to death
in her late sixties from surgery
of a gallbladder that gave her grief.

When she dies at ninety-eight
despite insisting she would make
it to a hundred and three
we follow her instructions
with the exception of two.

I don’t want a speaker. They talk
too long and might say something
bad about me, she says. Her best friend
speaks short and sweet and imagines
my mother-in-law smiling.

I don’t want a public viewing.
No one wants to look at an old
lady with wrinkles, she says.
People pack the church to see
what almost a century looks like.



Sharon Waller Knutson is a retired journalist who lives in Arizona. She has published ten poetry books, including My Grandmother Smokes Chesterfields (Flutter Press 2014), What the Clairvoyant Doesn’t Say and Trials and Tribulations of Sports Bob (Kelsay Books 2021), and Survivors, Saints, and Sinners and Kiddos and Mamas Do the Darndest Things (Cyberwit 2022). Her newest book, The Vultures Are Circling (Cyberwit 2023) is forthcoming. She has been published in various journals (most recently in The Rye Whiskey Review, The Beatnik Cowboy, and Silver Birch Press' One Good Memory Series).