*

Lawnmowers clip your words like blades of grass. What did you say? I yell over the noise. Purple irises bloom inside your mouth. Cirrus, cumulus, stratus: each word a wet petal falling from your tongue.

*

I read you every poem I’ve written since you left. You smoke—death hasn’t cured your addiction. We lie in the cut grass, but now you can see through the sky. Tell me something interesting about clouds, I say. You think it over, and then: Do you regret letting your phone go to voicemail?

*

Your voice sounds different, like a recording of your voice. I read you my poems about grief. You say grief is not about what’s lost, but what’s left behind.

*

The irises in your mouth are rust-colored. I store your cigarette smoke in glass jars.

*

The rain may never end. And why would it want to? Why would it choose to fall to its death?

Grief reinvents itself. Like rain.

*

Today, the sky is cloudless and I am filled with dread.

Pareidolia: seeing familiar images in random things. Like animals in clouds.

You blow a smoke ring. It looks more like your face than your real face.

*

I try to lift your suitcase but it’s too heavy. I open it and a single cloud escapes. Clouds are surprisingly heavy, you say.

*

bleeding heart  *  red-winged blackbird  *  hyacinth  *  fistfuls of onion grass  *  rhododendron  *  pistachio ice cream  *  sturgeon moon  *  nimbostratus  *  cirrocumulus  *  New and Collected Works  *  tiger swallowtail  *  sleepy orange  *  hibiscus tea  *  Japanese maple  *  cumulonimbus  *  sky as metaphor  *  goodbye in eight languages  *  ocean as metaphor  *  death as metaphor  *  goodbye as cloudless sky  *  goodbye as white noise  *  goodbye as sugar cube  *  goodbye as goodbye  *  goodbye

*

What will I do with myself, now that grief is no longer the heaviest thing I’ve held?