grief

Funeral: a Poem

Housed within my ribs
is a metronome that on a good day,
glistens like a cluster of amethyst,
but most days, it burns
like an arsonist’s proudest achievement.

It is an anatomical feature
I thought I disposed of
when sitting on fire escapes,
waiting for lovers to save me from the clutches
of my own sins & sorrows.

But she wrapped some grass around my obituary
and smoked it.
The vapors felt like my soul parting from my body,
but you did not say goodbye.

That day,
you made love to my ghost while a part of me watched.

That’s the shame of dying –
no one knows where we are
& I exited the room silently.

Isabelle Palerma

Memories: a Poem

Forgive me.
Memories are a wound &
I must carry them.
Nostalgia lies close to my skeleton bones,
and yet my past is clouded
like a mirror with its shine worn off.
Whenever I try to recall the small details of you,
it’s like gazing at a blurry photograph taken
many years ago
of someone I once loved.

& remembering your voice,
though I could listen to it the rest of my days,
is like hearing a phonograph underwater.

The way it falters in my mind
as though you have a stammer,
though I know you never stuttered.
It’s my mind that creates the gaps.

Memories are a wound &
I must carry them.

As I carry them, the past becomes less certain
and I wonder if my memories are true
or perhaps just something I wrote down
in a book.

Storytellers don’t always make the most reliable narrators,
but even through the gauzy haze,
our memories glimmer with a whispering beauty.

Isabelle Palerma

A Poem from Those Left Behind

A flame was never meant to extinguish this abruptly. Starved of oxygen, your origami letters became ash in a mouth that bled (for too many years).
I would say goodbye, but the word is a branding iron razed against a smoldering tongue.

Forgiveness never came easily for the dead.
Graveyards are full of grudges and barely concealed debts.
When I told you that I loved you, I disguised the words (behind shattered glass bottles and origami letters confettied like New Year’s).

I remember your eyes cold like marbles, frozen like winter ponds.
(I made a half-joke and thought myself funny, but your lips never curled up in a smile.)
This is autobiography, but all you ever asked for was a poem or a story (but not this – not an obituary or an elegy. Not a eulogy or a goodbye).

I could never say goodbye. I ran from endings & ripped the last page out of every book I ever read.

Sometimes, I even wrote stories that ended in the middle of a —