Remedial Grieving
Petey went—a bartender at Calamity Café.
I hadn’t seen him in more than a decade.
A few months later: my ex’s sister,
younger than me with a life
of wrong turns more like mine behind her.
I don’t understand grief, sense it getting closer,
wonder if the next death will touch me,
teach me to feel the sweet black rain.
I’m at an age when I recognize
many names on page 9A.
Not once have I wanted to claw my eyes
or drop to my knees in anti-prayer.
I don’t attend funerals, offer eulogies,
but whisper, Oh, as though today I learned
each person has been dead for years.
When I Hear Someone Say We Should Celebrate Death
I think of my first month in jail &
the guy named after a motorcycle
with whom I almost came to blows.
I knew him from the outside:
one of my dealers & lover to a friend.
When I spoke to her years later,
her voice summoned the memory:
his short, muscular form & lengthy curls,
the prank that caused the argument
(coffee poured on my pillowcase),
how I escalated, throwing water in his face.
He shoved me. I slipped on wet stone,
fell to the floor. That was the end of it
until I looked him up online,
saw from postings by his family
he took his own life the night before.
Were I to celebrate death,
wouldn’t it be then? A minor enemy
fallen as I once fell, but harder?
What I felt was hollowness
as though a part of my story ended
without my accepting his for its narrative
in which he played hero & villain;
I wouldn’t merit a sentence in the epilogue.
Stay Alive When the Song Has Ended
How do I take you out to see a movie
when the unvaccinated, glassy-eyed,
shove fistfuls of popcorn down
the escape hatches for their viral loads?
Dinner or drinks in a safe room?
(In The Masque of the Red Death,
Plague pays a visit all the same.
Fleas on rats. All the cats were dead.
Religion, with the best intentions,
does us in.) Isn’t music what we love?
Big men on stage strumming &
moving in ways no one my shape
should manage? That’s a miracle.
How about two? I want us
to stay alive when the song has ended,
revelers have carried their carrion
breath to another tomb.
What I’m trying to say is love is
dangerous, all we love while loving
a risk. Look at these tickets
finely printed on cardstock—
old-fashioned. They will
get us inside for the funeral.
