I woke up
a year ago today
innocent
unknowing
And went to bed
broken and heavy as stone.
They say that when
you lose someone
that day is forever
the end of your old life
and the beginning of the new one,
the life without.
Each day learning
how to cope with
the gaping hole
that was once filled with her.

my chest heaves
from poor health
or heartache
it’s hard to say
what I do know
is the weight
of your absence
feels heavier today

tomorrow's thanksgiving,
i've been trying to avoid
thinking about this day
for weeks.

i've lodged the thought of
it out of my head,
i've buried it away
but i can no longer
avoid it.

i don't want to
stare at an empty
place at the table.

four plates,
four forks,
four spoons,
four knives,
four glasses,
instead of five.

having to fill the silence
with questions about
school and post-grad life,
to steer the topic away
from how empty and sad
we feel without you.

at some points,
seven months
feels the same
as one.

time physically passes by,
and the next thing i know,
it's been seven months
rather than three.

it feels subjective to me,
i've been waiting for time
to mend me and my
hurting heart
but the day hasn't
come.

living with the loss
of you will always
sting,
even if it's just a bit.

i will stare at
the empty place
tomorrow and wonder
why you had to be taken
from me.

i give thanks for the 21
years i had with you
but they'll never feel like
enough.

do they celebrate
thanksgiving in heaven?

For My Cousin Jason*

I hide behind the shed in my backyard hoping to smoke
long, lingering grief away, imagining how you float
among back-lit clouds because I refuse
to remember how your body must have flung
into our grandparents' mint-rimmed pool that you claimed
was a sanctuary, I couldn't have believed the coroner's
conclusion, judging the crack in your skull--

            a suicide.

5:37 AM. Your mom found you face down, surrounded
by strange black waters--

           your blood

in barely-there morning sun, making us wonder
why you chose a late night swim to clear your hazy
brain where ship-wrecked joy drifted to the unperturbed
floor of a soul too weak to surface from hideous ocean-sized distortions we never would have found within lined-spine
daydream books of childhood. Even then I knew

          escapes

were your thing: and I wish I had sent a makeshift summer
reading list or voiced some pep talks when I had writer's block
at two in the morning because then I'd know if you wanted
to find your grave in a shallow end.

Your life, like white light, still ringing in brilliant clarity,
In bitter delicious memory in our minds.
-your beautiful life,
Standing out in burning silhouettes every time we close our eyes.

I write poems about you in my dreams.
I try to work it out in miserable half-sleep,
How a girl of thirteen could one day be wrapped in the arms of her parents,
and the next,
Immured in cold earth without mercy.

You cannot be gone.
You are so **** young.

You never met a heart you didn’t mark with the splendor of your beauty,
That outrageous, unique, chromatic personality,
Resplendent by nature,
Demure in humility.

Do you hear me where you are?
Sitting in glory at the feet of God?

Your parents will see you when they come Home.

I know that we’ll see you when we all come Home.

Its been years
And your voice seems so far away
It's been years
And your hug feels faint
Its been years
And I miss you everyday
Its been years
But the pain doesn't go away
And life isn't the same
I miss you with ALL of my heart
And it skips a beat
Now that we are apart
Life isn't the same
And its been years

The plants that I tended to all summer long,
They were all so fragrant and beautiful and strong.
But somewhere along the way, I forgot they were there
And when they started to wilt, I just didn't care.
I probably could have saved the plants if I had tried.
But I didn't, and so it is my fault that they didn't survive.

My brother had everything going for him, nothing was wrong.
He was so full of life and beautiful and strong.
I felt that little tug, but I ignored it and walked away.
I was the last one to see him alive that day.
I still feel like I could have saved him if I had tried.
But because I didn't stay, that was the day that he died.

My apathy is what killed them, and I know that this is true.
But I can't stop feeling nothing, I just don't know what to do.
The more things that die, the more things that I ****.
But I don't know how to stop this, so I keep standing still.

In this moment, I love the face of a dead man,
Repeated by chance in the guise of a stranger.

His lips quirk the same way in
Sweet sarcasm,
And in that moment,
Three years beneath the earth scatters,
Ashes to the wind.

And you are here.

His shoulders span the same width
And I know- cupped in my
Needful, grasping palms-
Their touch before I even
Pass a phrase to their owner.

I know, his abrasiveness is softened from a scour
To a pleasant heat
And those who hate it
Love him fiercely, unreasonably, and unquestioningly.

I know this
And yet this man
Is nothing more than a mirage left
In the wake of a fire storm.


After the remnants of goose-flesh have failed to leave my skin
I'll take it.

We might
pretend to understand, but
we don't.
Perhaps it only
feels finite.
Perhaps we only mourn so well
because we look
so good in black.
Some days, that
horizon looks closer
than others, but
it's hard to say
what, if anything, that means.
Seven months could
be a whole lifetime.
You can turn
eighty years into
a false start or
an apology.

Still… it's not enough.
Nonetheless... that makes no difference.

Time and space and matter
continue to exist,
and the same senseless
tragedies repeat.
A pain that once
seemed strange
becomes cyclical and
intimately familiar.
These brutalising patterns.
These seasons of loss.
Winter in July.
Graves that can never be
deep enough.
I know you.
We've done this before.
This feeling is closer and
more known to me
than the calluses
on my palms
that have almost healed
somehow.
Fading stigmata.
Apostle of a
small slain god.

I'm not making sense, and I know
I'm not making sense,
but then nothing does.