Poetry

At the Grave of a 28 Year Old

by

Ally Malinenko

Back home, my old lover
is tracing a line
with the tip of his sneaker,
a plot in the frozen ground.
This will be where he will bury his friend tomorrow.

And I don't know how to tell him how sorry I am.
We stopped speaking the same language years ago,
back when we fell in love so easily and we were sure we
would all live forever and never, ever
fall.

Up here, in the north, the ice is creeping up the windowpane
building a web like an invisible spider
and I am comforted by my solitude
while I listen for my landlords
heavy footsteps on the stairs.
The heat refuses to kick on,
and the cats tails are twitching nervously. My concentration is shot.

The thing is,
even though the days go by
and the miles keep growing between me
and the last place I left,
my movement isn't real. I could be gone for days, years
and would still find myself sitting in that old grey Chevette.
My left hand clutching the ball peen hammer in case it didn't turn over.
I would still be smoking cigarettes on the stone steps of the Carnegie Library
watching the man I will marry years from then
make his way down the sidewalk with that loose easy stride.

These memories come flashing back at me
like a woman who has lived longer than she was meant to
and what is to come is nothing but dark water.
Between the accidents and the cancer, are we cursed?
Little shipwrecked lives?
I wanted to give the dead
something better, a homily perhaps, to make sense of
the holes we dig for each other.
But all I have are these pathetic words
swept up in a pile of dust
by a foolish woman who has been running away
since she was 18.
In the end, they all deserve more.