POETRY : In the Week Since You've Been Gone / Konrad Ehresman
I am learning to be wrong,
thought time cured all
yet,
I am still infected.
Maybe, want
isn’t a sickness,
and need,
not wound enough to be stitched
by the hands of this clock.
I don’t know
is all I know, now.
That, and you left your rainboots by the door.
I saw them and prayed for the first time in years,
pled to any God who could hear - to open the sky,
hoped that wet socks might remind you of what you left with me.
and
I wonder, did your dentist tell you I called?
begged him to tell me how you turned your tongue to sugar,
explain how you dug cavities into these wisdom-less teeth,
how you made space for you in every part of me, and
what to do with all this room now that you’re gone.
I started to drink.
Thought I might drown the thought of you,
but I’m finding, evolution to be a tricky thing,
gills grow in faster than one thinks.
When the bottle is put to bed,
I stare at my hands and sob,
ask them why they could not hold on,
sometimes in the wee hours, I swear, they whisper back,
ask me,
why I can’t let go.
