Leave some space for dessert.
Let your grief be your cake,
Joy the icing.
Integrate your sorrow into the batter.
I still don’t know how to do it.
Only that grief is a house.
Whenever memory fuels my lamp,
I realize how big my house is.
Joy the hallways
where ghosts of the living I lost
and the dead gather.
But sometimes,
a warm body enters
the door. Pulls
a chair next to me.
Says, “Tell me
how big this house
feels to you.’
That, too, is joy.
This piece was first published in Anti-Heroic Chic on December 3, 2024.
