Paid Obituaries by Fran Schumer

No one will pause at the headline

to the obituary I won’t have,
the kind you don’t have to buy,
written before you die.
Reporters actually interview you for those,
bury them later in a place called,
believe it or not, the morgue.
But I prefer the tiny agate notices,
whole novels reduced to a one-inch note,
written about people no one knows,
paid for by loved ones who want
the world to know he loved Mozart,
she bred collies, his roses won a prize.
The same impulse that causes us
to paint, to plant trees,
splash graffiti on buildings,
trash cans, subway cars
rusting in old train yards –
To say: we were here
and we wanted someone to know.



Fran Schumer’s work has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, The North American Review, and elsewhere. She won a Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing poetry fellowship. Her chapbook, Weight, was published in 2022. She studied political theory at college but wished she spent more time reading Keats.