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Alright, this poem is bumming me the gently caress out, so I'm posting it now even though it's only 267 words. Eat it, Benagain, you monster. 267 words - Flash Rule: can't use the word "death" Every Day After I was drunk at your funeral strung out at half-mast while your brother administered the eulogy, as dry and creased as the maple leaves that hung, limp around the memorial garden. After the service the others wouldn’t look at me, their eyes fluttering away from mine like frightened sparrows as if the loss were contagious, a widowhood of the soul and your urn a strange trophy of my survival. At home in the bed I don’t sleep in I press my body into your outline pretending I can still smell your scent on the sheets,searching out every last particle and pressing them into my skin for safekeeping. And now the phone bring brings an anniversary every time someone calls up; the memory of that Monday and the measured tones pouring bad news down the line followed by the steady drip drip of condolences, like an icepick between the eyes. I didn’t cancel your newspaper subscription, kept your name next to mine on the mailbox as if the entity called you and me still exists. I only keep the crosswords though, filled in and folded into paper cranes that roost with ghosts of your cup on the coffee table. The last note that you wrote me lives in my wallet, folded like stray DNA your essence pressed into the paper so that as I stand on the shoreline and watch yesterday’s sand sink back in, and even as the wind separates your ashes from my hands and the last strands of you unwind and disappear into the substrate I can still pretend that I’ll see you again in the morning.
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← # ? Jan 13, 2013 18:20 |