Grief Written

 And with that final act  With what you’ve now done I can finally fully release you And thank god It’s easier than inhalation  Everything I thought I knew about you  A belief  And in writing this I find a sense of      .

I am reaching for a concept to convey what I’ve been meaning to say But it feels out of reach  And I say that truthfully Yet underneath it Is the heart of the matter which is — Well somewhere outside of me Edgar Allen Poe’s tell-tale beneath the floorboards calling out to me, The perpetual haunting. But find myself waiting with bated breath - for Gadot. And this is all just a literary workaround to avoid any true sincerity. Leaning on pomp and circumstance to avoid the trap door beneath the podium.  And really this is all just to say, I’ve been reaching for a concept Because it’s easier than reaching for any man I’ve ever loved And it’s easier to dress up my words and blame any lack of understanding on just lacking literary reference. This is all just to say, I’m afraid of my notebooks and ghosts pressed into the page even after it’s been ripped away. Even now Even here I can hear the beating of hearts that were once mine beneath the floorboards of each poem I traded Or is it ...

I ignore any gravitational pull  Dismiss it for physical proximity  Lending my mind to illusionary truth theory  There are no soul ties  Threads binding our pages together  Because the spine has been cracked and closed too many times  It’s all pulling apart  Like gravity

And may he never receive that type of love again  At the same time May I never extend it  Or accept anything that resembles this

And any I love yous offered   Have become as empty as his apologies As the doorway   The space in the bed beside me The lines in my notebook  As I search for an inkling  Of his sincerity but find only myself lingering. In my mind I practice slamming doors closed, Instead of throwing open bed sheets Shroud every mirror. Reaching for my anger beneath the floorboards of a home that has a resemblance in both our wavering childhoods, But only finding his. It’s cold in my hands —  Like the tin cans we’ve tied to another, stretching across all this time. I cannot tell if the whispers in the dark a re between the boy who used ride his bike to school afraid it would one day vanish — And the girl who pretended she had a magic wand to make the nightmares disappear. Or if it’s the poltergeists, Drug in with the antiques of our adolescence .

In between all my thoughts  I can feel myself trying to justify even rationalize  all the anger, resentment and pain  you cast onto me. I didn’t deserve it, To pay a price for a debt I didn’t incur. A pound of flesh, Or two or three, The sum of my heart.

I told him one night when we were both drunk in my kitchen, That when I was a little girl and I would have a particularly bad nightmare —  I wouldn’t yell out for my mom or leave my bed to find her. Gathering myself up the best I could I would imagine in my mind a wand, that I would wave around my bedposts. I knew that it wasn’t real but in those moments I believed in my own magic just enough to wrap it around me. When my little brother would have a nightmare and he would come into my room with his pillow and blanket, I would let him sleep on the floor — even though he snored. The night before he was married I thought of this, How not even a year before he had knocked on my door and slept in the twin bed across from mine after a nightmare — despite being well into our 20s.  In the kitchen — when I told him about my magic wand, his brow furrowed and he looked lost for a moment. I thought of how his mother would trail her finger from his hairline, down the bridge of his nose, ov...