love songs. laments.
Tara Avery
i.
we are never ready.
we are never ready.
the hand clasped in mine;
the skin—paper-soft-paper-thin—under my lips;
the pull of breath to breath to breath:
all of these whisper:
soon soon
all of these whisper:
now.
the fighting
the denial
even the hope:
all of these must end.
we are never ready.
we are never ready.
ii.
Some goodbyes you get only once
and they never taste right—
sawdust or ashes or dirt,
a sum of parts whose whole
tastes of memories and things unsaid,
kisses ungiven, gestures taken for granted.
Some goodbyes taste of bony wrists and crepe-paper skin,
of catheters and curtains and cots
and the ghost of a girl once called Red.
iii.
she died in the fall
under the turning leaves,
the whisper of cold, of snow, in the air.
everything wound down slowly,
the fading tick of a clock
long worn into the wrong hour,
keeping time in a different place;
one where we could not follow.
she died in the fall
no one slept for days
rain fell
the time the clocks kept
no longer made sense.