Poetry Thursday, grief, again...

Poof
 ~Amy Gerstler

Here on my lap, in a small plastic bag,
my share of your ashes. Let me not squander
them. Your family blindsided me with this gift.
We want to honor your bond they said at the end
of your service, which took place, as you’d
arranged, in a restaurant at the harbor,
an old two-story boathouse made of dark
wood. Some of us sat on the balcony, on black
leather bar stools, staring at rows of docked boats.
Both your husbands showed up and got along.
And of course your impossibly handsome son.
After lunch, a slideshow and testimonials,
your family left to toss their share of you
onto the ocean, along with some flowers.

You were the girlfriend I practiced kissing
with in sixth grade during zero-sleep
sleepovers. You were the pretty one.
In middle school I lived on diet Coke and
your sexual reconnaissance reports. In this
telling of our story your father never hits
you or calls you a whore. Always gentle
with me, he taught me to ride a bike after
everyone said I was too klutzy to learn.
In this version we’re not afraid of our bodies.
In this fiction, birth control is easy to obtain,
and never fails. You still dive under a stall
divider in a restroom at the beach to free me
after I get too drunk to unlock the door. You still
reveal the esoteric mysteries of tampons. You
still learn Farsi and French from boyfriends
as your life ignites. In high school I still guide you
safely out of the stadium when you start yelling
that the football looks amazing as it shatters
into a million shimmering pieces, as you
loudly admit that you just dropped acid.

We lived to be sixty. Then poof, you vanished.
I can’t snort you, or dump you out over my head,
coating myself in your dust like some hapless cartoon
character who’s just blown herself up, yet remains
unscathed, as is the way in cartoons. In this version,
I remain in place for a while. Did you have a good
journey? I’m still lagging behind, barking up all
the wrong trees, whipping out my scimitar far
in advance of what the occasion demands. As I
drive home from your memorial, you fizz in
my head like a distant radio station. What
can I do to bridge this chasm between us?
In this fiction, I roll down the window, drive
uncharacteristically fast. I tear your baggie
open with my teeth and release you at 85
miles an hour, music cranked up full blast.

What is so hard about grief is precisely this: (note from the author when her poem was posted on the Poem of the Day (emphasis mine):

 “An elegy that blends predominantly real and a few fictionalized details, this poem was written in honor of a friend who I met way back in fifth grade, who died last year. The loss of this bright, adventurous, beautiful woman who’d been my friend since before either of us wore a bra, since I had braces and hair down to my hips and she was a tall leggy pre-hippie with a cool nickname, who’d coached me through so many ‘firsts,’ (first drunkenness, first crushes, first sex, first drugs, etc., etc.) who had been such a beacon, is hard to process. Poems being one of the ways we can attempt to speak to and of the dead, this poem is for C., who was always 10 steps ahead of me.”

How do you speak of the dead and how do you keep your loved one alive?

Everyone going through grief will tell you, in lucid moments, that talking about your loved one is bittersweet; it is like that bruise you touch to ignite the memories. Of course, it is painful to recall your loved one is no longer here. But whether we like it or not, especially in the first few years of loss (yes YEARS), the knowledge that your loved one is gone is with you like the air around you. Those loved ones linger in every word, every memory, every breath. And, the thought that others will forget what is foremost in your mind, is even more painful. 

It is so very interesting how the memories have come to me over the last six years. As we approach the sixth anniversary of my sister's death, I am remembering the months before her death. We were all desperately trying to survive the death of my brother, gulping for life like someone drowning gulps for breath.

And then she was gone. No, then she was in the hospital and we were having to let her go.

I thought I had borne the greatest pain when I watched my brother's body dropped into a grave. It changed my relationship with cemeteries. It made me hate the place that took him to forever.

But this was so much more painful. So painful in fact that I tried to turn off life all together.

We were on the third day of being in the hospital when a friend noticed I hadn't eaten.

I remember that, but most of the rest of those days I do not remember. I only remember pain and hollow and a horrible headache. My head recalls the pain, as I write this, it explodes in the same pain.

In the past few months, I have been able to approach the memories of those days. Not full on remembering, but tentative glances through the portholes. I am still not sure what is real and what is distorted.

But there are other memories, too, that pop into my mind. Memories that are now only mine - of time with my sister and my brother - stories that only we three knew, that only we three remembered.

I wonder how I will learn to say good bye to them, or if I have to... and it hurts.

Poetry Thursday

Self as Goat in Tree
~Mihaela Moscaliuc

Nine goats scamper up
the gnarly argan tree and graze it clean.
They ingest the wrinkled fruit whole,
though it’s the bitter pulp alone
that rouses their appetite for more.
Sated, they stare at the horizon
till branches wear thin and fall.
Farmers harvest goats’ droppings
to extract the pit rich in kernels of oil.
Haven’t you too wished yourself a goat
perched punch-drunk on a linden tree,
blasé about the gold you might shit,
how it might serve both hunger and greed.
Haven’t you goaded yourself
to balance just a bit longer,
chew on some fugitive scents,
forget what a ditch the earth is.

Poetry Thursday

Bitch Instinct
~Analicia Sotelo

Before this day I loved
like an animal loves a human,

with no way to articulate
how my bones felt in bed

or how a telephone felt so strange
in my paw. O papa—

I called out to no one—
but no one understood. I didn’t

even. I wanted to be caught. Like
let me walk beside you on my favorite leash,

let my hair grow long and wild
so you can comb it in the off-hours,

be tender to me. Also let me eat
the meals you do not finish

so I can acclimate, climb into
the way you claim this world.

Once, I followed married men:
eager for shelter, my fur

curled, my lust
freshly showered.

I called out, Grief.
They heard, Beauty.                   

I called out, Why?
They said, Because I can and will.

One smile could sustain me for a week.
I was that hungry. Lithe and giddy,     

my skin carried the ether of a so-so
self-esteem. I felt fine. I was

fine, but I was also looking
for scraps; I wanted them all to pet me.

You think because I am a woman,
I cannot call myself a dog?

Look at my sweet canine mind,
my long, black tongue. I know

what I’m doing. When you’re with
the wrong person, you start barking.

But with you, I am looking out
this car window with a heightened sense

I’ve always owned. Oh every animal
knows when something is wrong.

Of this sweet, tender feeling, I was wrong,
and I was right, and I was wrong.

Poetry Thursday

Hummingbird Abecedarian
~Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Arriving with throats like nipped roses, like a tiny
bloom fastened to each neck, nothing else
cuts the air quite like this thrum to make the small
dog at my feet whine and yelp. So we wait—no
excitement pinned to the sky so needled and our days open
full of rain for weeks. Nothing yet from the ground speaks
green except weeds. But soon you see a familiar shadow
hovering where the glass feeders you brought
inside used to hang because the ice might shatter the pollen
junk and leaf bits collected after this windiest, wildest of winters.
Kin across the ocean surely felt this little jump of blood, this
little heartbeat, perhaps brushed across my grandmother’s
mostly grey braid snaked down her brown
neck and back across the Indian and the widest part of the Pacific
ocean, across the Mississippi, and back underneath my
patio. I’ve lost track of the times I’ve been silent in my lungs,
quiet as a salamander. Those times I wanted to decipher the mutter
rolled off a stranger’s full and beautiful lips. I only knew they
spoke in Malayalam—my father’s language—and how
terrific it’d sound if I could make my own slow mouth
ululate like that in utter sorrow or joy. I’m certain I’d be
voracious with each light and peppered syllable
winged back to me in the form of this sort of faith, a gift like
xenia offered to me. And now I must give it back to this tiny bird, its
yield far greener and greater than I could ever repay—a light like
zirconia—hoping for something so simple and sweet to sip.

Poetry Thursday, still celebrating Black history

Poem Full of Worry Ending with My Birth
 ~Tarfia Faizullah

I worry that my friends
will misunderstand my silence

as a lack of love, or interest, instead
of a tent city built for my own mind,

I worry I can no longer pretend
enough to get through another

year of pretending I know
that I understand time, though

I can see my own hands; sometimes,
I worry over how to dress in a world

where a white woman wearing
a scarf over her head is assumed

to be cold, whereas with my head
cloaked, I am an immediate symbol

of a war folks have been fighting
eons-deep before I was born, a meteor.

Poetry Thursday

Entry 003 from I love you and I’m not dead
~Sade LaNay

New moon in midheaven, in Libra. The hermit wields two swords. Temptation overcomes the star. The chariot travails with weakend strength. Death rises to meet every face you meet. Ten wands whittled from prickly ash. Fall in love with a teacher. Build a home on the moon. Grow twinberry and gentian. The chart culminates in a stellium of ginger coins and wild yam discs.

Black History Month, Poetry Edition

America Gives Its Blackness Back To Me
~Shane McCrae

The shadow I had carried lightly has

Been forced upon me now and heavy since

Bulky since     now and since unwieldy as

A corpse the shadow I     was born from in


And to I     should have known I couldn’t being

As how it wasn’t me who lifted it

Not     all the way     from me in the first place being

As how its lightness after was a gift


Its near-     bodilessness a gift     from those

Who bind it to me now I should have known

I couldn’t while they watched me     set it loose


They bind it     to my back they make it strange

That I knew     in my arms they weigh it down

With the shadow they had kept the bindings in