May 2010
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1999
We were driving to your funeral & our father was not crying because he has a way of tying ribbons around grief. It was the year we learned the piercing that prefaces the blood holds the most delicate of darknesses. Then it was the year we opened all our faucets & waited for the sea to bleed to death. Then it was the year we set fire to your mitt. Then, suddenly the year we started to...
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My Husband Discovers Poetry
Because my husband would not read my poems, I wrote one about how I did not love him. In lines of strict iambic pentameter, I detailed his coldness, his lack of humor. It felt good to do this. Stanza by stanza, I grew bolder and bolder. Towards the end, struck by inspiration, I wrote about my old boyfriend, a boy I had no loved enough to marry but who could make me laugh and laugh. I wrote about a...
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By Small and Small: Midnight to 4 A.M.
For eleven years I have regretted it, regretted that I did not do what I wanted to do as I sat there those four hours watching her die. I wanted to crawl in among the machinery and hold her in my arms, knowing the elementary, leftover bit of her mind would dimly recognize it was me carrying her to where she was going.
-Jack Gilbert
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The Thing Is
The thing is… to love life, to love it even when you have no stomach for it and everything you’ve held dear crumbles like burnt paper in your hands, your throat filled with the silt of it. When grief sits with you, its tropical heat thickening the air, heavy as water more fit for gills than lungs; when grief weights you like your own flesh only more of it, an obesity of grief, you...
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