Written from a prompt by Siaara Freeman
Grief is my stern-mouthed mother,
though people swear we must be sisters
the way I age with every loss.
It’s in the eyes, they say.
She has come again
to dote on me
since my love has gone.
She shows up unannounced and never alone.
She comes swinging a bird cage with a cockatoo named Bargaining
perched inside.
It repeats everything I say back to me minus the question marks.
Depression is my father.
He demands that I carry him from room to room
while he haunts my house with deep slow sighs.
Anger is a territorial child in a dirty party dress and scuffed patent
leather shoes
looking for things to break
while my spinster aunt, Denial, stands in the front yard humming
Didn’t We Almost Have It All.
She never comes inside on the off-chance Love is coming back.
I feed them whatever I happen to have in the freezer.
It is an unthawed bounty of lonesome
an entire wedding cake minus the groom
plastic bags of changed locks and apartment keys
the other halves of all the dinners I have ever taken
the time to lovingly cook
only to eat my portion alone over the kitchen sink
a brick of foil-wrapped anniversaries uncelebrated
a cold-cut spread of photographs and love letters.
When every stomach has been fed,
when at last we are full and numb-mouthed from feasting on freezer-
burnt wanting,
when Grief is dozing off in front of the nightly news,
and Bargaining is building a nest of newspaper obituaries,
when Depression lays whiskey-sick and snoring
across the couch
and Anger has tantrumed herself into a fitful sleep
under the dinner table,
my grandmother, Acceptance, who stores promises in the deep
creases of her brow, hands me a dish towel to dry each plate and
platter that she washes until they sparkle like new again.