snoday

i thought i had grief down to an art: throw the ashes to the wind, catch them in your mouth, and move on but i can't work through this as if it were a checklist loss is not linear, a recipe reading: simmer in sorrow, sadness, anger until it is reduced by half, a glaze of grief at the bottom of the pan my doctor can keep his Kubler-Ross model, give her five stages another five years because i am not finished tearing at my shirt, painting mascara Roschorch on my pillowcase, letting my blood of the oxygen we both breathed i hear the respirators when the rest of the house is asleep your funeral flowers still hang in the rafters of the at