Re:
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Grief is
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dropping a plate on a tile floor.
It shatters in two or three large pieces.
You sweep them, trash them, lift them out of sight.
Months later, you step on a sliver, a shard lodged into the tile, the foundation, the soil—
I
I haven’t seen the sun in weeks. It’s not unusual. The grey is unrelenting.
When I was young I declared my favorite color purple. It seemed like a Big Thing then, something I could project myself onto, an imaginary friend of sorts.
Realizing, a few days later, that I didn’t know my mom's favorite color, I worried I didn’t know her at all. "Grey," she said when I asked. I told her that grey can’t be a favorite color. That it’s a replacement color, a substitute that comes off the bench when orange and blue can't shoot the basketball anymore and Coach is angry. I said it’s too sad to be a favorite. She shrugged. "I like it."
And so I figured my mom was probably sad. I figured I should smile more, draw her pictures, so she'd change her favorite color to yellow.
Stage Three | Bargaining
Beckon dreams and laminate them,
Chase memories and lap them—
I’ll trade you tears for sleep.
Hannah once told me that “grey” and “gray” mean different things.
Grey is sharp, somewhat conniving. That professor with thin glasses and a precarious laugh, who nods at raised hands but never calls on them. Grey likes monologues, doesn’t want to be interrupted, never runs out of breath.
Gray is absent-minded, but fundamentally kind. The woman on the bus with chunky shoes and abundant yarn, which she sometimes knits and sometimes doesn’t. Gray is open.
Hannah said that's why she always spells it with the “a,” to let it breathe.
Maybe my mom meant gray.
II
III
My mom was sad.
She grew cold each January and left each February, all bare toes and cotton skirts, to go chase the sun. She always found it, pulled its sunbeams around her body like streamers around a maypole, stuffed its warmth under her fingernails for safekeeping.
I think this is why her grey hairs shimmer a bit when she turns; I think this is why her hugs are always warmest in March.
And my mom is sad, but it’s deeper now. She’s been thinking of her little brother, who had more grey hairs than she does. He lived in San Francisco where the fog swallows sunbeams before they can breathe, and his hair never shimmered, not really.
The Bay turned grey when he jumped. I never drew him pictures.
That mountain I love is you now, and
I drop my words instead of rosebuds, and
you live in that place, between ode and tree root,
and I find you there when I breathe.
The Idea of You, Not You Yourself
My therapist asks if I’m afraid of becoming you.
I know I’m afraid of unfair questions,
of spirals, how we drew them on lined paper
and predicted our Mansion futures, how
even though the future is inescapable,
We visit a Swedish Disneyland. Wander through imagined histories, cobblestone painted on asphalt. Go to a church, which looks like a barn, which feels like neither. Stand where your parents married. You raise your chin, nod to the place between wedding vows and theme parks, divorce and Happily Ever After, reality and unreality. I take your photo.
you escaped. But you didn’t.
I’m afraid that I’m breathing you away, that
my stillness depends on your awayness, that I’m here
and you’re gone
and I’ll go.
You ask me to look up your old girlfriends on Facebook. Your face droops when you find them, their families, their pickled smiles. The kayakers saw you fall. I got the call in the car. Wondered what it would be to forget the highway altogether.
You are memory now it slips
inconsequential metaphor,
You cross your eyes. Your voice is gruff with stubble.
susceptible to gravity, wispy, with
grouchy lip curls what are we
if not projection?
if not ashen recollection?
if not unfair
not afraid
I take your photo.
The idea of you is you yourself.
Ash and the absence of ash.
Stage Four | Depression
Something your body may have made,
too heavy for the earth.
Stage One | Denial
There was a boy at your funeral.
He seized his chest like you’d grip a leash.
Stage Two | Anger
You had a different God than I.
Prayed not to celestial bodies but to bodies in celeste.
You can’t swallow faith without water.
Poems I Wish I Told You
Invasive species we still pretend
to love as though we’re dying.
We hit home runs with rotten crabapples,
baked those crabapples into pies,
pretended our moments weren’t sour or
spoiled. And our breath cozied the words
we spoke, and I swear I saw air curtsy
as though it dances sometimes—
I know we’re dying.
Dying lonely in strange cities, and strange
in lonely cities, and maybe loneliness would keep
good company if we let it talk, just let words slip,
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realize verbs are all we have to name ourselves,
realize we have to write about why
we did what we did, why
we fell silent.
Hope: the idea that we can grow on sunlight,
photosynthesize like grass does,
grow until fog sinks and we can’t see the sun.
I don’t see you jumping.
I see you running, throwing frisbees behind your back,
you don’t care where they land—
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in our hands, in our chests,
in the ocean.
“He’s in a better place”
I wonder if that's where dropped words go—
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The ones that fall out of our corduroy pockets and grow
along sidewalk cracks and get caught between blinks.
All the demure sorrys that should have been fuck yous and
All the I hate yous too nervous to be I love yous and
All the goosebump moments too shy to be clothed.
I wonder if I can find my mismatched socks there, my lost keys,
my decisiveness and clarity and all the things I can never retain.
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Stage Five | Acceptance
Mom says there will always be a knot;
Dad tries to untie it.
Sister hums humidity;
Mountain clenches ash.
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