Original Free Verse Poems

The strangest part is the ordinary: how the fridge still hums its one note, how the bills arrive addressed to someone who will never open them. We divided the labour of grief the way we divided everything: my sister took the clothes, I took the paperwork, my brother took the garage and came back holding a fishing rod none of us knew existed and a box of letters from a woman named June who none of us had met. It turns out a life, disassembled, does not resemble the life. A kitchen, emptied of its person, is just a room with knives. We sat on the porch that evening drinking the wine he'd been saving for something, unable to say what the something was, unable to stop pouring, unable to go inside where his absence had made itself at home more thoroughly than he ever did.

My mother's hands could find a fever through a forehead, could tell a melon's ripeness with one knock, could fold a fitted sheet into a shape that made sense— a trick I've never learned and now refuse to google because some knowledge should only travel by hand. Her hands braided my hair with a firmness that said I will not let you go into the world undone. They peeled an orange in one long ribbon, held it up like a small trophy, and I believed, at seven, that this was the most impressive thing a person could do. I still believe it. Her hands are slower now. They shake with the coffee. They pause sometimes mid-task as if the hand forgot what the body was doing. I hold them when we walk— not because she needs it. Because my hands remember being small in hers, and they want to return the fit.

I mean the way he folds the map even though the phone knows where we are. I mean the scar above his eyebrow from a story that changes every time he tells it and gets better. I mean the sound of him making breakfast like a man who has been personally offended by the egg. I mean Tuesday nights when he reads out loud to me— not because I've asked, but because he found a paragraph that couldn't wait, and his voice does this thing to other people's words that makes them sound like they were always meant for this room, this lamp, this hour. I mean the quiet thing. The way he checks the locks at night— not once but twice— and thinks I haven't noticed this small, repeated act of faith that the world is a place worth securing. When I say his name I mean the whole ordinary catastrophe of loving someone so completely that the word for it hasn't been invented yet. His name is the closest I can get.