5 months

Dear mom

I’m trying to pretend like my heart is not breaking

I’m at the river And the clouds aren’t moving And the sun is pressing me into the ground And it’s snowing willow fluff If I say the word cacophony can you hear the birds?

There’s a boulder in my chest And I want to dislodge it and find words underneath Like ants And for each word to carry a morsel of the boulder out of my body on their backs Like ants

And I saw some ants the other day in the form of a poem and felt for a moment a little less alone It said

On earth just a teaspoon of a neutron star would weigh six billion tons. Six billion tons equals the collective weight of every animal on earth, including the insects. Times three. Six billion tons sounds impossible until I consider how it is to swallow grief—just a teaspoon and one might as well have consumed a neutron star. How dense it is, how it carries inside it the memory of collapse. How difficult it is to move then. How impossible it is to believe that anything could lift that weight.¹

dear mom

I’m trying to pretend like my hearts not breaking

But my body is all that I have left of you

and in every moment alone I look for you in my head And I find you in the kitchen in my head And there’s onion and garlic in my head It smells so good in my head And you look at me and smile in my head And tell me you love me in my head

I delete your contact from my favorites list but not from my phone completely because how can one bring oneself to do a thing like that

dear mom

Can you understand why my heart is breaking

1. This poem is called Watching my friend pretend like her heart is not breaking by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

The words that gave me some words