By The Sleeping Forest
There are revelations to be found by the kitchen sink at 5AM,
when there's no hiding from the sunrise peering through the window.
She sits on the bench in which I once honed my teeth
and smiles so sweetly it makes my coffee all the more bitter,
like an antidote; she says:
"I loved him with all the strength of my clenched fists,"
(and despite that smile her use of past tense does not escape me.)
"I loved him with all the hope of a homeless man by a restaurant's back door,
waiting to fight feral cats for scraps of yesterday's meal.
We are closer now than ever with only the marble slab,
six feet of dirt and a wooden box between us."
I pour my coffee down the drain. There's no offsetting the sickly sweetness
of her rotting memories; that wound, left open for too long.
Why do I continue to prod it? There is nothing left to excise,
and the hollow where the past used to live only ever aches us when it rains.
It would be better to pretend that nothing ever grew there,
and so nothing was lost. Still, I cannot help mourning what never was,
clinging to what little remains: the familiarity of that sunrise;
the echo of emotions once felt; the phantom pain
of a severed
limb.
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