You’re still here in all your flesh
and memory serves to correct me
on the little details caught up
all around me like dead skin in dust.
How often I look at photos memorizing
the ghost lines of a gone face,
paying my condolences to an empty casket
and curled consciousness, yellowed with the wear
of bringing you out and setting you in my sun.
And grief is a cruel mistress, keeping the dead alive,
or maybe the living just dead enough for me to still own you,
take your future captive,
to tell stories to my friends of the used to be,
ignoring that there is a right now going on in a universe
I don’t belong to.
And it’s only when I set my heart on my Portion,
On the lone One who knows the intricate weave of all the cells
I can’t see,
That I can see my right now, too, how it doesn’t have to be
darkened by the once was.
How I can bury you whole and still breathe,
watching you breaking through all my wrongs
like a flower breaking earth.
© 2023 by Ericka Clay
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Ericka Clay 