Tag: grief
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The Lantern’s Vigil
This poem began as a study of ritual and light—how grief moves through objects without naming itself. I wanted the river to do the speaking, to let the lanterns fail quietly and completely.
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The Purple Glass
The Purple Glass” began with an object my mother once handed me—useless, she said, but beautiful. The poem traces how that uselessness became memory’s last vessel, holding what language can’t restore.
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Morove Cemetery
Morove Cemetery” began as a walk through memory and inheritance. I wanted to write a poem that refused sentimentality while still holding grief in its architecture. The poem is built from objects—signs, stones, flowers, fences—that carry the emotional weight without commentary. It’s a landscape elegy, where the dead are marked by what survives them: rust,…
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A Thing I Do Instead of Sleep
This poem emerged from a sleepless night and a remembered sound—an owl’s hoot imagined against the silence of a hospital corridor. It’s a sonic elegy, a gesture toward the moment my mother’s voice carried the weight of my deafness.
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Bone Confession
Bone Confession began as a way to name the physical weight I carry from the people I’ve lost and the ones I couldn’t help. The poem grew from a single pulse in the wrist into a record of how the body stores memory—through objects, breath, and the small actions that prove we’re still here. I…
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Reverb
Reverb” emerged from a moment of quiet recognition—when I realized I was speaking in my mother’s cadence, carrying her grief as if it were my own. The poem is built as a series of couplets that echo generational sorrow without resolving it. I wanted the rhythm to waver, to enact the instability of grief itself.…
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Undo
“Undone” emerged from my lifelong reckoning with memory and survival. After losing family members in a tragic accident, I found myself haunted by the idea of reversal—not just of time, but of blame, grief, and the unintelligible aftermath. The poem imagines a world where trauma rewinds: collisions un-happen, blood disappears, and the dead return to…
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The Empty Chair
This poem originated from the ritual of watching films with someone I loved, and the chair she occupied became a consecrated site after her passing. Each line mimics a film frame rate—24 letters per line—so the poem itself becomes a reel of memory. Commas and dashes act as cuts, splicing grief into cinematic rhythm. The…
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Finalities
Finalities emerged from a moment of ritual clarity after my mother’s passing. I wanted to honor not just her memory, but the gestures others made to restore her—clipping her hair, dressing her in youth, renaming her Elsi. It stages mourning as a quiet choreography of speculative grace. It’s about the transformation of a woman into…
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Ghosting
“Ghosting” emerged from the quiet aftermath of survival—after cancer, after loss, after the rituals that remain. It’s a poem about haunting not as horror, but as intimacy: the idea that love, memory, and consequence linger in objects, gestures, and the dog’s bark. I wrote it as a speculative elegy, imagining my own absence as a…
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A Proper Fold
A Proper Fold emerged from my ongoing exploration of ritual as both inheritance and resistance. I wanted to write a poem that honored the quiet violence of conformity—how grief, gender, and legacy get folded into gesture. The speaker is a 4-F child shaped by military precision and familial duty, yet excluded from the honors that…
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Photo Stop
This poem began as a meditation on gesture—specifically, the act of photographing something not to share, but to preserve a private emotional truth. I was thinking about how grief often manifests in small, unceremonious rituals: lifting a phone, deleting and retaking an image, placing it back in a purse chosen for protection rather than style.…
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When the city leaves you—
When the City Leaves You is a poem about the aftermath of abandonment—personal, civic, and emotional. It unfolds in fragments, each stanza a vignette of silence, gesture, or failed connection. The speaker moves through a landscape of urban decay and quiet witnessing, encountering figures who reflect their own disorientation. The poem resists resolution, instead dignifying…
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Flash Flood
Flash Flood is a poem of witness—set in the Tennessee hills during a sudden flood—and traces the unraveling of lineage, memory, and land. The poem honors the quiet promise to stay, even when everything is being undone.
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Arguing with the Dead
Arguing With the DeadBegin by calling her by name,not the one etched on the granite monument in front of you,not the one printed on the birth certificate—that temporary name another motherwas forced to dream upin the haze of post-labor fade,in the ecstasy of seeing youfor the first time—something that grew for nine monthsinside this other,and…
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The Birds Remember Everything
A lyrical meditation on city birds, memory, and instinct. This poem honors the quiet rituals of return, grief, and the histories we refuse to name.
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Brief Encounter on Aisle Five
Brief Encounter on Aisle FiveIt is this way:She sees him first—aisle five, cereals— where the honeyed light fall softly on him— and her. The way he cradles Cheerioson the cart’s edge—firm in his handsso if they slip, they fallinto the safety of the cart,into the touch of his little girl-—lets her knowhe once belonged to…
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Prayers Between Us
I do my laundryin the rhythm of my mother’s prayers—each crease a rosary,folding divineto divine.I count the timesher perils met mine—with hands that trembledat my fever,hands burntin a kitchenunseen,List the register of her and mine shared frailties:the way we flinched at sudden joy, unsure it would stay,All the letters written to my heart—the notes she…
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Quiet Remittance
Quiet RemittanceI didn’t follow my father’s instructions this time.I just tucked his ashes into my inner coat pocket,where they warmed me with the good memoriesof pregame paella feasts and watching the Hurricanes,in the built over old Orange Bowl now Miami Marlins Stadium.All the anesthesiologists, the lawyers, his employees—his old crew—performed his scattering script line by…
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Supermoon
My wife was still doing her hair and makeup before our meal at Cocina Abierta—a seven-course tasting circled in red weeks ago—a promise we weren’t sure we’d keep.So my brother and I filled the hour wandering the narrow streets of the city rooted in my mother’s heart and past, San Juan—where I’ve paused—for now—before our…
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Walking My Dog Without My Glasses
Walking My Dog Without My GlassesI depend on my four-legged little boy to navigate the blurwhen I’m out walking the neighborhood without my glasses.I follow the leash—him tugging me off course,left, then sideways—nose deep in something rich and rude but insistent.Yesterday, it was a brown squirrel disappearing into leaf-shadow,a harem of dogs perfumed by musk…
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There Are Places Where Children Dwell
There are places children dwell— no letters to Santa, no cookies or milk on Christmas Eve— just feathers on windowsills, pretending they’re posts from mom.There are places where children dwell who hum the first sung lullaby from their mother’s doting throat instead of prayers that ask for sleep and their souls to keep.Places where children…
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Inside the Places that Light Can Not Reach
Inside the Places that Light Can Not ReachTrenches carve silence in the ocean’s deepest foldswhere pressure crushes and light dies before arrival—beneath ice pressed tight by a thousand years,where silence sleeps in frost older than stars—limestone cathedrals rising from the littoral hush,where even echoes have forgotten the sun—Deep in the brain’s hippocampal fold, where memory…
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Snow Globes
Snow Globes There are tableaux we make out of dinner plates, a child’s lost sock,a father’s coat on the bannister,the silent, stuck smile of a motherstirring steam into endless errands—windows frosting into the same patterns,altars of dusty decades accumulating unnoticed in twice told stories, reupholstered sorrows,all the slow cyclones of repetition caught under glasswaiting for…
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Walking in the Rain
Walking in the RainI don’t know why rain breaks my heart.No one I loved ever died on a rainy day.In my life, it has become an elegy to sunshine.Maybe, it’s because rain feels like tears.I go outside when it reduces to a soft drizzle,just before the scent of petrichor has settled into the earth,my dog…
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I Should Have Followed You
I Should Have Followed You “Can I still call you Dorothea?”—even though the black and white lines in the paper reduce you to the habit you wore, arrange you into silence, a name and surname surrendered to the cloistering of lilies. Somewhere beyond this obituary, the grown children you once taught trace grief into their…
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Final Call
Final Call The screen flickered in the hush of enveloping dark, Michael Douglas pacing, his fate unraveling— *Fatal Attraction,* a movie about consequence, its shadows pressing forward. But beneath the flickering flames, something was wrong, settling into my gut like a held breath, bending the air—quiet rupture, breath held too long. Five minutes home, five…
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Landline
I dialed the landline to my childhood home, let it ring into the past— again and again and againI knew my parents wouldn’t answer. They’re both dead. Still, the ringing soothed— each unanswered tonea promise that someone, anyone, might answer. After ten rings, a recorded message came on.The voice was full of girly twang and…
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The Gate
Like everyone else, I can only step through the gate my mother and father took to enter this world. I must exist in the space their bodies made. Their walk set my path and determined my streets. I hear their voices in the crunch of the compressed gravel of every footfall—echoes of their stories I…
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Reasons
Things are going as planned. My mother died. My father died. I am aliveand bound to fateI recite the mantra to myself: “A father is fate,” drawing the Harrow along my fetid soul, turning over what was planted in me, digging up the weight of his will. But a counterchant arises, the one I will…
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The End of the Pier
I walked to the end of the pier and could not throw your ashes into the sea.It was easy with my father— to see his blackness float in the air and settle on the wrack line, neither the earth nor sea’s possession.But you, dear friend, my lost sister not of the soul but of pain,…
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A Son’s Lament
It’s been over thirty-five years since I felt your motherly touch, and I no longer try to shape a garden of sorrow. Instead, I let the new grass flame, its green distinct from the old cold fire, whose embers tighten their ring with each passing year. I find joy in the crepe myrtles unfolding into…
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Trying on My Dad’s Wingtips
I tried on several of my father’s old Brooks Brother suitsjust before his funeral, trying to save myself the expense of an outfit I didn’t need. Each was too tight on the collars. too short on the sleeves, each crotch inseam strangled my manhood.I had outgrown them all.Almost all of it will go to Goodwill-except…
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This cannot end with us
I fall back into the comfort of our once existence.every time the other sibs cry out your absence in black texts- how they MISS YOU SO MUCH.And yet, your stories are my memories.In their writing down I am there with you, so much.There with you -mom- in that old faded yellow Chevrolet traveling the black…
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The Bullet
In that living momentthe bullet goes right by me—and in between all my prayersand my eternal gratitude — the child behind me dies. “Why did it spare me and not him?”,I think over and over again—counting the lifetime of wishesthat now will never come true for him.—It goes right by me—penetrating present and future— —dreams…
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Ghost Light: A Heartfelt Exploration of Grief and Healing”
MOVIE INFO: When melancholic construction worker Dan (Keith Kupferer) finds himself drifting from his wife and daughter, he discovers community and purpose in a local theater’s production of Romeo and Juliet. As the drama onstage starts to mirror his own life, he and his family are forced to confront a personal loss.Content expanded. fandango-at-home REVIEW:…
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Light
When I was a child light shone angels through my fingerscrowning my parents’ faces,blessing the simple tasks of theirs: table setting, pouring water—how it lit the world in my upturned smileand flowed through as I grewand how it followed me homeand stayed, even in the dark.Light was the water, earth,reflecting off every animal, every street,…
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The Cleansing Cycle
i like to cling to the grimethe small grit of my father’s ashesunderneath my fingernails, the part of him that refused to fall to the rocks in the scatteringmy mother’s scented oil in her hair,her burning fat seasoning in the skilletstinging my nostrils and eyes leaving me seeing smelling less than my faultering earshis ash…
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An Old Cold Wives’ Tale
His wife turned cold. He touched her,hoping to die, at the least, maybe sleep. He did not die and he still could not sleep.Her coldness did not dry him out inside. He looked outside and noticed the street littered with other cold wives, demon hands holding them down in a web of rootssprouting from the…
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A Grieving Song for Unsung Lullabyes
Small steps, my child,in this wilding place.Sharp life everywhere,the spaces too. Steps, small steps, child, tiny prayers, hopes blowninto the trees, the faraway birds,taking safety in the chantof this golden butterfly’s rise,who drank from the splash of the summer rainin the chase of light atop the trees.Small steps, child, forward, sure and true.
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I Hear the Gapped Heart
My past is blind, locked in its own code.The sunlight is the only gold I own.Grief, birth, the scent of night rain,time’s count down is my inheritance.The wind that lifts the sea, leaves it’s salt drying on my fingers- a dream salvaging the tideline’s gleanings for things oncegenerous, intense, yet lush and lean. I hear…
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Amongst the Monuments
One day I will commit the greatest heresy and spread my father’s ashes over my mother’s grave.I will sit, with them and all these other named and nameless cloud covered bodies stretching to the horizon—a final gesture, maybe, but surely a goodbyeto how they came to this place, and how I must leave when the…
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Clarity
Joy rises in feathered swirls on sorrow’s wings, above the illumined dusk— the grieving heart of all living things.
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Heavier than Age
Morning heavier than ageleaves the birds weighted to the limbs, unable to break out in riotous morning song.In the distance— a church bell,people in black creeping around-“Heaven. Heaven,” in their earsfor the poor soul laying beneath.They wish to hear only the sea.The old sea. The new sea. Any sea— to catch their tears, drown their…
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Prayers and Miracles for a Daughter Passed On
When his daughter died he made a church of his pain, the only truth he believed— the truth of his grief.In that shrine, he could pray, must pray:“Lord, suffer me to know these wounds of which I am. Savor, ease this lonely creature.”“Everything must die in the beauty of your grace.For in that loss I…
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The Blind Man’s Spot
My hands touch the flagstones of your tomb.In this world of persistent shadowsmy feet go numb walking to this spot.I hear the wind scuff the white granite all aroundossifying thedirt, blood, stonebelow into my nostrilsand lungs. I sit on the benchnear youalmost seeingthe specterof birdsstopping their prolong flightinto the comingstillness of night trees,never really knowing…
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The Death Wife’s Tale
After nine months,three hours of laborand a mile of wanderingTahlequah gave birth in the middle of a salted world.For half an hour,Tahlequah could look into her child’s eyes.For thirty minutes the child, until it became silent, was a sacrament to love.In the inexplicable beauty of her death Tahlequahdecided to carry her.She remembered how there was…
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Our Song of Sadness
Live long enough and your Father will serve you grief with oranges on a silver platter—Shed enough tears and your Motherwill appear, remorse in one hand,a pomegranate in the other—Bury a spouse, and salt will be your servant, once the beloved’s water leaves, and you’ve swallowed the last bitter herbs.Lose a child, and light will…
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the spaces she left behind
they turned brown before you arrived by the time you came on them swiped the dust off turned the pages they were crumbling you never looked at the rest surrendering them to silence you could lie down again now there was nothing between you now the rain was beginning outside or was it just the …
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Grief Dog
Our new dog, a chihuahua mini husky mix,tries to fill, with kisses, the space of all the dogs before, even some of the people. I think he could smell the ashes on themantle of all those that came before him, feels the grief in us that ebbs and flows. I have a sizable collection grown…
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Mother Are You Proud of Me?
They tore your body apart.You died among walls of infusion boxes.On the television, the Pope riding by in his Pope mobile.Are you proud of mewhen I cry?Are you proud of mewhen I don’t?Peeking through the slats of the living room blinds,I discovered your body slumped in the reclining chair.Will I ever know the truth of…
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Answered and Unanswered Prayers
Many are the mothers who cry to Godfrom the release of woe for slain sons.How mother and child, prayed innocently with pure heart, to be spared violence’s plagueBut from the high placesthe prayers that are grantedis for power, power and gloryand honor forever- and nothing more.
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Talking Away
I use to think about grief,building loss on loss, sorrow on sorrow,into a silent groan in my bowelsof ever churning lamentsmourning for the comfort of dead faces.All the sorrow and lost infused my words. It leaked out to the white spaces betweenunwanted vowels and syllables : to the house gone, parts removed,friends lost, the broken…
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Walking Her Bicycle Back Home, Alone
Oh, child of mine, I’ve come back toreclaim your most precious thing from that blue ravine off the stone road.I lack the steadiness and pulse of movementto ride it home.So, I walk it back totally alone now,remembering those first unsteady lessonsuntil you found the perfect balance to peddle this silver dreambeyond my steady support.I will…
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At Sunset
Your death must mean just enough not to curse the day you were born,to stand by the water’s edgeand not want to swim with stonesuntil the first dark wave takesme under in a fetal pose,sinks me down in the last breath,the clear waters almost your ghostpushing me back, allowingme to walk away.Of course, I will…
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The Cursing Stones
Ariana, adopted the old Greek ways, when Nikos died diving for sponges. She encased her curses into two lead stones: smuggling one into his coffin, dropping the other into Naxos deepest well. She made sure Nikos soul would carry her curse to the underworld before it ascended to heaven, or activated fully on the river…
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Pieta
Perfection can only be seen in the descent, the glow of spotlights colliding to true whiteness, the realization that grief touches the ground. Mary, they say, you never experienced birth pains, but the linen folded eternally beneath your son shows that his final blessing transferred all to you. Your tears wash his feet,…
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Soft Body Memories of Our Grief
We exist in unkeepable bodies and in the bending over we decompose for we are are but the memory of grief that soft bodies leave when they die.
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Underwater
I am Jonah in the belly of Leviathan living only when the beast surfaces, exchanging liquid grief, heavy air for the unwanted gasps of new life. I pray out of this belly for gills and only the ocean hears my voice, It deepens and encompasses me, its waves billowing me in absolution. The…
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Diary of Your Last Breath
December 3, 2019 She was displayed before me with her eyes closed and mouth agape, leaving me to wonder whether she died in terror or awe. Was her last breath the honest gurgle I’ve been seeing for the last few days, that I took comfort in hearing restart every time I called her name…
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Grief Is Everything and All
My grief is stillborn, not consoled by the hope of replacement of another good little boy or girl with brown paws and a gentle lick, another Anne or Tom with eyes that cry of heaven and a bright mind that can write lines of cerulean clarity or calculate pi to the twentieth decimal, a wife…