for this, I am grateful. This elegy
doesn’t want a handful of puffed rice

tossed with mustard oil and chopped chilies,
but wants to understand why a firefly

flickers off then on, wants another throatful
or three of whiskey. This elegy is trying

hard to understand how we all become
corpses, but I’m trying to understand

permanence, because this elegy wants
to be a streetlamp dying as suddenly as

a child who, in death, remains a child.
Somewhere, there is a man meant for me,

or maybe he is meant merely to fall
asleep beside me. Across two oceans, there

is a world in which I thought I could live
without grief. There, I watched the hands

of a leper reach with hands made of lace
towards a woman who leaned into him.

There, I fingered bolts of satin I never
meant to buy. There, no one said her name.

How to look down into the abyss without
leaning forward? How to gather the morning’s

flustered shadows into a river? To forget
my sister was ever born? Tonight, I will

watch a man I could have loved walk past,
hefting another woman’s child. He won’t

look at me. I won’t have wanted him to.
This elegy wonders why it’s so hard

to say, I always miss you. Wait, she might
have said. But didn’t you want your palms

to be coated in mustard oil? Did you really
want to forget the damp scent of my grave?