This is the first poem from our new series “From the Garlic Field,” featuring high school age poets who studied together at CSSSA 2026, writing to their own prompts together. New piece every Wednesday. Feel free to write along to their prompts (or to share the prompts with the poets in your life).

The prompt for this poem was:  You get to meet someone that you know, but this person is dead. Who is the person? What do you do?

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dead things (worth knowing)

by Sophie Ma

i don’t know very many dead people, but i get the feeling
that they are far more knowing than me, and therefore people worth knowing.
maybe it is simply because they have experienced something none of us have–
death.
like, there are a few things in life that i just can’t experience,
and a few things in life that i can only experience once.
like eating a fatal mushroom, edible (but only once).
but, of all the dead people worth knowing, i think i’d like to meet my pastor’s dead dad.
the one that was allegedly a pervert and truly an old man.
not for any particular reason, just that there’s been a lot of controversy around him and his family,
i wonder what he would think of it. i wonder if he ever considered himself a pervert.
it’s weird in the church, because everyone is trying to be so moral.
and they want everyone else to think they are incredibly straight in their ethical compasses,
when we all know north points in different directions for most everyone (it’s like the bermuda triangle).
it’s like they use this as a buffer, one of those bubble soccer balls you slide into,
so that no one will realize that the whole point of a church is to house sinners.
i don’t know, maybe they think that recognizing they are sinners
is already innately moral of them.
they don’t know that i (and most people) can also admit to being a sinner.
that’s not really the hard part.
maybe. or maybe caring about ethics so much is simply part of being a good person,
i wouldn’t know, i don’t have much experience being a good person.
or, well, i try. obviously. and i suppose there is a difference between being a good person,
and being a nice person.
like, i feel that being a good person you simply need to have a bottom line
you won’t cross.
i like to think of myself as a good person because i would never kill and i try not to argue,
and most of the times i don’t often think of harming other people.
but i’m most certainly not a nice person. that’s much more complicated.
there’s an aspect of likability that comes with being a nice person,
and that requires the intent of doing certain things purely to please or comfort another person.
that’s always been sort of an anomaly to me, because, really, the only reason i do things like that
is for the rush of dopamine after i’ve been decidedly nice.
so that makes it about me, again, doesn’t it?
if the coin turns the right way and flips into the crack of the table,
i suppose i could be a good person. i suppose i am not a very nice person.
this idea crosses my mind often, and i’d like another person’s opinion about it.
(i think that makes my opinion a little more concrete)
so i’d like to ask the perverted ex-pastor, i think he’d know a little bit about
being a good person.

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(Featured image from Pexels)