Day 22: Emptiness Is an Unverifiable Concept
Your shoes are there in the corner;
you will never wear them again.
Your coffee cup is still on the table
where you left it to dry.
I tell myself
I weep for you.
The oriole sings
in this shade, this half-light.
If I hold your coat against me long enough,
I almost feel you as I fall asleep,
dream of the oriole’s feathers
green and black,
black as my mourning.
It’s music cannot reach you,
and though I hear it,
the blackness remains.
This is pain
of a bitter wedge
of plum unchewed,
swallowed too quickly,
bruising the throat on the way down.
Remembering is swallowing. I swallow again
and again, knowing I cannot spit it
into the napkin or wash it down the sink.
To climb out of this grief
is all I ask,
like the cicadas
shed their skins and live.
Laura Hanna will graduate from Auburn University with a MA in English in the spring of 2015. She is published in several literary magazines and is the founding editor of These Fragile Lilacs Poetry Journal.
Day 22 by Laura Hanna is a post from: Straylight Literary Magazine