My Grief

my grief

                it feels like gritty uneven cobblestones scraping against bare skin

                the kind you stumble across if you look where you’re going rather than where you are

I give up on forward momentum, sliding down onto the only stable thing in my world

surrendering my body to Mother Earth’s lap of jagged edges and deep crevices

the strange comfort of pain meeting pain

my grief

                it smells like geranium leaf and mandarin rind

                not the blossoms and fruits, just the bitter leavings

                emitting a fragrance with an edge to it.

                I get in the shower seeking the comfort of water, and privacy for my wailing,

                and now the scent of this shower gel is a cellular memory forever linked to

my grief

                it tastes like salt

                and black coffee

                tears saturating my pillow after the long dark nights

                then resuscitating my body with copious amounts of equally dark coffee

                reawakening to the horrific truth again and again

my grief

                it sounds like ocean fog that rolled in thick and damp / muffled

                a mirage of softness that cannot be held

                shifting and obscuring clarity, its gift to me

                muting the painful truth just beyond its edges

                silencing the world around me as I mourn

my grief

                it looks like absence

                dents in pillows where they used to lay, mind-shadows in doorways, shades of grey

                I take long solitary walks at dawn, feeling a kinship with winter’s bare branches

                empty arms exposed to the cold, brittle and bare

                the reduction of embodied lives to ashes / I succumb to

 my grief