Some songs have a girl's name.

And I wonder
what came first?
The song or the title?
The passion or the girl?

I expect it was the latter,
followed by the sorrow.

And I expect the words
were found much later.

I read of your passing and paused mid-bite.
The world seemed to grow colder, but you knew
it was time to begin your next adventure, one
far beyond this familiar world we had shared.

Scientist — no, pioneering champion —  
in the fight against cancer and diabetes,
you were humble even in your brilliance.
A giant among men, a heart greater still.

I can only think of each time you passed
me in the hallway, your shy smile luminous
even as you ducked past me as if afraid
I might start speaking about what we had both

lost so long ago. You had always been my late dad’s
favorite boss, and I remember the thoughtful albeit brief
email you sent me when the cancer took him, expressing
your sorrow that a great scientist and fellow man had left

this cruel world far too soon. Now you join him
and I picture the two of you, both clad in white lab coats
colliding in an awkward embrace, eager to update one another
on all that the other had missed from the other side.

magnolia’s cream-mottled cheek
   marking yet another bygone era
   plunked into the abyss as sorrow
   burrows into us, roots that become

our prisons / our refuge, the delirious
journey into what we've come
     to recognize as our shadow selves'
   last fragments of a fallen season

that last slanted sunset reflected off the lake
hinting with its brilliance at what we simply
could not admit to ourselves. The expanding
distance between us we hide in and seek thereafter

How I wish to you hold you
Even just once more
All my thoughts distorted
Now that you're no more

these echoes are still in my mind

(that look in your eyes,
the one you gave across the world)

scraps of you torn apart by time

(the promises we made,
wavering like a conquered flag)

On this day celebrating
or reproaching love, I can only
recall each year you were still here,
clutching a fragrant bouquet for mom

never mind the allergies that flared
even as she, beaming, placed each
one in the dark green sturdy vase
certain to hold the life within

Now she sits in the gloom
of a room that is too cold, empty
nester forced to befriend the shadows
and suppress the urge to burrow

into small cracks, senses heightened
with the absence of those fragrant
bouquets that never failed to remind her of the fullness of home, of you

by images of a home
he once knew, destroyed —
the deconstructed fox hole
now a pile of sticks and stones
patiently waiting for the howl
of a broken man so desperate
to revive or rebuild something
not as revolting as it once was.

Somewhere in the distance,
an owl or mourning dove practices
cutting the space with its melancholy
melody, the refrain at once familiar
and strange, echoing a time
between time, nestled
in the crook of calamity.

I calmly take it all in, content
to watch the slow unraveling
of a life that isn't mine, one
or two worlds apart yet close
enough for me to realize

how it, too, yearns for another realm,
for a chance to burn their dead,
to be revived by the only song
desperate enough to crawl
back to the very place
that had once destroyed it.

You loved every inch -
My scars, marks, and bruises.
I carried a part of you, for a time...
And you held me as I bled out on the bed.
You told me I was beautiful.
You cradled my face, and kissed me when I cried.
Your hands made me feel I was worthy.
When you knelt before me, I was.

There is a hole now.
Not torn, not ripped
but hollowed.
Like wind wore down the center of me
with soft, persistent cruelty.
No thunderclap,
just the slow erosion
of something that once stood watch.
You were barely more than breath,
a flicker in the straw,
a warm weight that made morning feel
intentional.
And I
the one who named myself protector
looked away.
That is all it took.
One glance elsewhere,
and the universe took back its loan.
I did not cry out when it happened.
There was no sound left in me.
Only the sick realization
that absence has a shape.
That love leaves residue.
That I was the architect of your undoing.
Now the days come blank.
Food tastes like guilt.
The sky is heavy with things I cannot fix.
My hands. these hands
they shake, not from fear,
but from knowing they could have stopped it.
How many heartbeats have passed
since yours didn’t?
Time moves, but I do not follow.
I sit within the rift,
counting all the ways I failed you
a thousand imagined rescues
playing out too late,
too slow.
There is no metaphor here.
No phoenix in the ashes.
Just me,
and the grave I dug
with the illusion of safety.
Hope feels obscene now,
as if it doesn’t remember
who you were.
And I am tired.
So deeply tired.
Because to love something,
and then lose it
to your own neglect,
is to live each moment afterward
as punishment.