Our Lady of Perpetual Loss

Each grief has its unique side.
Choose the one that appeals to you.
Go gently.
Your body needs energy to repair the amputation.
Humor phantom pain.

Your brain cells are soaked with salt;
connections fail unexpectedly and often.
Ask for help.
Accept help.

Read your grief like the daily...

This century is younger than me.
It dresses itself
in an overlong coat of Enlightenment thinking
despite the disappearing winter.
It twirls the light-up fidget spinner
won from the carnival of oil economies.
In this century, chatbots write poems
where starlings wander from their murmuration
into the denim-thick...

we are not that kind of country.

We are sanctuary for the hungry,

the homeless, the huddled,

held together by an idea

our immigrant fathers believed in.

Rendered, it meant independence.

Pursued, it kindled war, ordinance,

a fighting chance. Forty thousand

musket balls, by themselves, did not

shape the...

    Driving, dogs barking, how you get used to it, how you make
                            the new streets yours.
Trees outside the window and a big band sound that makes you feel like
     everything's okay,
  a feeling that lasts for one song maybe,
                 the parentheses all clicking shut behind you.
          The way we move through time and space, or only time.
The way it's night for many miles, and then suddenly
                                     it's not, it's breakfast
   and you're standing in the shower for over an hour,
                   holding the bar of soap up to the light.
I will keep watch. I will water the yard.
      Knot the tie and go to work. Unknot the tie and go to sleep.
                            I sleep. I dream. I make up things
   that I would never say. I say them very quietly.
                      The trees in wind, the streetlights on,
          the click and flash of cigarettes
being smoked on the lawn, and just a little kiss before we say goodnight.
      It spins like a wheel inside you: green yellow, green blue,
                                  green beautiful green.
   It's simple: it isn't over, it's just begun. It's green. It's still green.

Faintly remains.
Scarcely remains.

Drops of  water form inside my life
as if  I cherish a drop of light
just as love is formed inside the word love
just as the word goodbye doesn’t permeate it

it faintly lingers.
A thin part of me remains.

Sometimes inside me...

Home is a sound.
 I can hear it
in the western meadowlark, the inlaid rocks in my driveway,
 in the accent and slang
of my mom’s voice.
 It’s engrained
 in her stretched vowels,
in her smashed-together words, in her
 hard Rs,
and in the word rez.

I grew up hearing...

Her skin never wrinkled
And I used to wonder why

Her skin never wrinkled
As every year passed by

Look at Grandma's hands my mom would say
I bet you'd never think of how they stay that way

As she grew older
Her skin remained smooth and...