Ghost Town Poetry: Christopher Luna in the Pacific Northwest: Poems In Loving Memory of Cathleen Luna

Wednesday, December 31, 2025

Poems In Loving Memory of Cathleen Luna

Cathleen and Christopher Luna

The last photo my sister Vicki took of our mother

For Mom

Open palms at the ready

To receive your stuttering grief

To hold your sobbing shatter

We all need to break occasionally

To facilitate a reset

Take a breath

Then leap back

Into the struggle

Many are beginning to realize

That our separateness

is a dangerous illusion

our spirits linked

by nothing more mysterious

than our humanity

among many gifts

my mother passed me

her fear

her doubt

her guilt

her nihilism

then sent me out

into a world

quite free of

her bosom’s refuge

to figure out how to survive

fortunately, her unwavering support

and unconditional love

were enough to allow me

to learn to proceed with

fearless enthusiasm

Before the wake

Debra warned Abram

that when he saw his grandmother in the casket

that she would look different.

Abram asked, “Is it because her soul isn’t in there anymore?

Her soul is everywhere in a million pieces now.”

Never in the history of my family has a decision been made by the group

more quickly than our agreement to close my mother’s casket.

Like every traumatic wake I’d attended in childhood

the body in the box bore no resemblance to the person we’d known

I touched her arm for a moment; hard as stone.

Passionate, curious Abram had bravely decided to have a look

and the rest of the day was particularly tough on him.

My seven-year-old nephew whispered to me that it was his first funeral.

Later we stood before the empty bottles mourners filled

with messages for my mother, whose favorite song was

Jim Croce’s “Time in a Bottle.” Later these bottles were placed in the casket.

I informed Abram that he could write as many messages as he wanted to her.

“How will she hear me?” he asked. I pointed at his little chest:

“If you keep her in her heart, you can talk to her whenever you want.

You never have to stop talking to her.”

The note I wrote to my mother to place in a bottle placed in her casket

On the drive to the funeral

I tell Debra about Toni’s love for disco

and that knowing my wife has expanded my musical palate.

When Debra describes disco as bubblegum pop, he asks,

“Can we eat disco?”

Abram asks if Gramma is going to go underground.

Asks if we’re going to see her again.

I answer, “She’s in your heart, bub.”

Stop short of saying “no.”

Mom’s mausoleum faces a baseball field.

My brother explains that Mom loved to attend

Greg and Abram’s baseball games.

October 11, 2025

St. John’s

Riverhead, Long Island

I escaped the molestation, the affliction of guilt, the lifelong certitude that everything human about me is a sin, and my mother’s fear of EVERYTHING, but especially happiness, which she was taught to believe she did not deserve; however, it would be dishonest to characterize this self-awareness as liberation because I am left with an erotic charge provoked by transgression or even the mere fantasy of consummation of such. The naughty boy I was raised to be suffers with a perpetual hard-on over the possibility of being caught, exposed, unrepentant.