Here’s my permission to skip this poem and post. I can’t think of a more depressing way to end the year.
I’ve been thinking about grief a lot lately, perhaps because of my chronic nostalgia, or the holidays, or something else entirely. So, I wrote this poem about a moment that has haunted me, a moment I regret, a moment I often rehearse in my mind. In a backward way, getting this out in words and sharing it brings some healing for me. Perhaps you’ve had a moment (or hundreds) like this one. Maybe you should put it into words.
And Every Day Since
The phone came to life
In small, desiccated movements.
I looked down and saw your name
And knew again what I’d known
For years but couldn’t articulate.
I was fourteen, but even then I knew that
To answer would be to lose
What I’d lost
A thousand times before.
To hear your drowning words:
Half-thought, dizzied, dulled
And drained and emptied;
Caught, addled by chemicals
Strangled and strangling—
That would be worse. A knot too tightly tied.
So that old lime-green phone (you know,
The kind that slid open and turned on its side),
It rattled on in my lap,
As I rattled down the road in the passenger seat
Of Kyle’s disintegrating, halting Chrysler,
Sitting and seized in a kind of grief no boy should know;
And I let it go to voicemail.
And that day, and every day since
I lost you.
And you lost me.
I’d die to hear your voice
Just one last time;
To see that name light up that old phone, and know
It was actually you.
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Revival and Renewal 
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