Grief

After Coral More

When other people
talk about grief

I think about
how you alive
feels the same
as you gone.

How the empty space
between us opened
long before
your breath stopped
filling it.

Flying too close to
the sun
feels as impossible
as escaping
the black hole
the sun
leaves behind.

My wings melted
and I fell inside
of you.
Your gravity
snapped my bird bones
which is to say
even when you’re dead
I cannot avoid
your silence.

Many lines
have been crafted
for missing fathers
and strong mothers.

I cross the genders
in my mind
try to relate

and fail.

Those are not
my poems
any more
than you were
my mother.

I wrote another poem for you
about astrophysics
moon metaphors,
of the endless descent
toward death
we all face,

how you decided
to murder your voice
and me
so much earlier
than disease took your body.

If this was your way
of saving me
from the black hole
of your disease

you failed.

Conspiracy theorists
talk about rogue planets
like they’re the danger

but what about the star
that severed my
gravitational ties
and broke my orbit?

Whose fault is this

really?

Ask yourself,
“Who was
the son
in this situation?”

Sometimes I wish
this had all happened
when I was a baby,
before
I could speak
to you
and before
you
could stop
speaking
to me.

If Icarus
never knew
his father
he never would’ve
had to escape
that tower
anyway.

Myths can never decide
who the victim is.

We use them
to explain
what we can’t understand.

Like why the morning came.
Like why the wind blew.
Like how I managed to survive

any of this.