Young Widowhood (ending in the ICU)
You’ve learned to stitch hems around the borders
of your grief to stop the threads
from running wild, to burn the edges
like a flame to a ribbon to keep
the fray at bay. Your usual grief is thick, pervasive, oozing
over everything, but tonight it’s erratic, an itchy
tag that scrapes your waist and some days you think of him
less — an oxymoron of guilt
and relief — I want to lead you out
of the space where you are trapped between
those afternoons when L was still alive and now,
so grateful when you say last week was a good week:
the term widow less a wall and more a window you might open
and tumble through. Maybe it would help if you left
the house, something about holding still
in places where he also held you
seems unfathomable in the immediate aftermath
it was the second question people asked
Will she stay in the house? after the whispered
What happened? how I loathed their lowered voices, the hush
around addiction. I want to scream
his truth, loud like a banshee, herald his death
with a high-pitched keen, make it louder than the vital alarms that blared
in the moments after he died until you snapped
Can someone please fucking turn those off?
I couldn’t help it. I smiled, so happy
to glimpse that strong bitch I knew you’d need to be.
◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆
Monitors
unfamiliar with the way
a ventilator’s fake breath can shake
a loose body when I first saw him
from the threshold
of the ICU’s door
I thought he’s nodding, for some reason, he’s nodding, Yes
*
we could not stop watching
the screen’s numbers —
blood pressure, body temperature, pulse —
and never have I ever understood
the definition of a word so clearly
vital vitals absolutely necessary
telepathically I willed an uptick
from a bedside chair whispered as if from a movie
script, Come on, L. Wake up and we can fight again. I tilted my neck up
to the blue digits like one might do
to watch
an eclipse a meteor shower a comet
some unfamiliar light’s manifestation some fiery
chunk of rock flaming its way through
the ever-expanding universe
unaware of why it’s falling or where and how and
what it will destroy when it lands