I am a container of stories about you
and I bring you up repeatedly, uninvited to.
Do the people around me want to keep hearing about my dead wife?
Or does the room go silent when I mention you, shining alive?
I live with your absence and it’s been 2 months since you died.
I’ll speak to your absence and carry our stories around my whole life.
But when I’m in public I don’t know what’s that look in their eyes.
I now wield the power to transform a grocery store aisle into a canyon of pity and confusion
and mutual aching to leave.
The loss in my life is a chasm I take into town and I don’t want to close it.
Look at me. Death is real.