To lose someone close to you is to enter an experience no amount of forethought or hindsight can free you from. You must live through grief. You cannot outsmart it, nor think through the fact of someone's being gone, and forever. You must survive the sorrow.

Every pore mourns. Not the brain, nor the chest where bereavement nests, but the body, whole--how it burns. The ache of new bone being grown.

He said being dead was a little like living, only longer.

Grief might be easy if there wasn't still such beauty--would be far simpler if the silver maple didn't thrust its leaves into flame,trusting that springwill find it again.

I think it is in grief that we need some reminder of our humanity--and sometimes, someone to say it for us. Poetry steps in at those moments when ordinary words fail: poetry as ceremony, as closure to what cannot be closed.

A quiet snowglobe of pain I want to shake. While the flakes fall like ash we race the train to reach the place Emmett Till last whistled or smiled or did nothing.

There are gods of fertility, corn, childbirth, & police brutality--this last is offered praise & sacrifice near weekly & still cannot be sated

How I wish I could leave or forget all my dead.

Like grass in rain, my dead grow at an amazing rate.