You’re reading Good Grief. We’re glad you’re here. Enjoy this week’s original piece!
The night is here to allow ships to pass, stars to shine a long-dead light, intended effects to take shape, to find the form of each of everything’s point- ed edges, disjointed and angled nowhere, suggestive of this severed symmetry. On the TV, the president shouts about the state of the union, about each state’s lack of union, about which he assures he’s fit to fix by nick-naming us Illegals and arming every Nick in sight with the legal right to fight the aliens for them. From the set of a staged kitchen, a senator sheds a single tear in the name of all Nicks and their neighbors, the nearby nicks and scrapes, splinters, scabs scraped and picked off on TV tonight by officials from both parties, both picked off and elected for office, slowly and unsteadily — and suddenly I’m angry again at the sink suds still stirring despite the long-dead daylight. Their insistence on my attention, my insistence on their intention, the space the kitchen suds sink into, the stains they leave in poems, the strange shapes they take on stage. Seven years of therapy to learn to know better than to take this personally. To make personal the next seven, their knowing and undoing better. I’ve set the stage all wrong. Nobody watch, not before I know anything on purpose. Which I'm too old to still search for. Which I’m too young to say. Ask me how old I am. Are you worried that’s rude now? Do I look good? Admit I do and won’t always. Not this way. Can you handle that, or should I? Do it for me, will you please and do tell me, how often do you see your mother, if you have one? I shouldn’t assume. Are you, to someone? I have one. Should I see my mother more, or less? I’m not one. Should I be? I need mine. The dogs need dinner in their dishes and the dishes from dinner are still in the sink and the whole house needs rearranging. A mother, or some better version of me, would know. Perhaps I’ll be both. Perhaps both will die before I do. Perhaps I’ll remember these as the best years of my life, the shapes we made with this space.
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We’ll see you later this week with a Spotlight piece. Until then, have another poem or two. Or ten.
Wow chills! Truly a beautiful read. “Ask me how old I am.
Are you worried that’s rude now?
Do I look good? Admit I do
and won’t always. Not this way.
Can you handle that,
or should I? “. My favorite part