On Finding My Obit Online
I laugh because they are and are not me,
the ego-googled dead who share my name.
The popup flower ads pop up the same
for me in Maine and me in Tennessee.
I need to click each link so I can see
if who I never was but still became
resembles me, as if this morbid game
could end in more than flat finality:
the verbiage of blurbs and viewing times.
My laptop glows (cold, indiscriminate)
as I wipe thin tears trickling from a yawn.
The wall clock, like a starved canary, chimes.
More than one me might eye a screen tonight,
chair creaking when he learns another’s gone.
Brian Brodeur is the author of four poetry books, most recently Some Problems with Autobiography (2023), which won the 2022 New Criterion Poetry Prize. Recent poems and literary criticism appear in The Hopkins Review, The Hudson Review, and Pushcart Prize XLIX (2025). He lives with his wife and daughter in the Whitewater River Valley.