‘My Body Mourns, Limb by Limb, as I Recount Your Final Days’
— Joyce Chong
The feet offer
their own confusion.
The left steps
while the right remains,
a mausoleum.
Told in the format of marking time from the day of, time as a distance traveled, today’s poem treads grief as an ever changing terrain. Specifically, the ways in which grief acts upon the body and the mind, how it shifts the world around you and makes unfamiliar the known, and familiar the strange. Schmeltzer paints grief as something dynamic and migratory, a living thing in itself, with its own consciousness and intent. The body becomes foreign under grief, from the stiffness in the muscles of clenched hands, to the mistaken familiarity in everything you see; the wayward ghosts in your head.
I don’t know what hunger is for
or what to hunger for.
You cannot give me
any more anymore.