Suicide’s Note: An Annual 

Mary Karr

 

I hope you’ve been taken up by Jesus

though so many decades have passed, so far apart we’d grown

     between love transmogrifying into hate and those sad letters

           and phone calls and your face vanishing into a noose that

I couldn’t 

     today name the gods

           you at the end worshipped, if any, praise being

impossible for the devoutly miserable. And screw my church who’d 

     roast in Hell poor suffering

           bastards like you, unable to bear the masks 

of their own faces. With words you sought to shape

     a world alternate to the one that dared

           inscribe itself so ruthlessly across your eyes, for you

could not, could never

     fully refute the actual or justify the sad heft of your body, earn

           your rightful space or pay for the parcels of oxygen you 

inherited. More than once you asked

     that I breathe into your lungs like the soprano in the opera

           I loved so my ghost might inhabit you and you ingest my belief 

in your otherwise-only-probable soul. I wonder does your 

     death feel like failure to everybody who ever

           loved you as if our collective cpr stopped

too soon, the defib paddles lost charge, the corpse

     punished us by never sitting up. And forgive my conviction 

           that every suicide’s an asshole. There is a good reason I am not 

God, for I would cruelly smite the self-smitten. 

     I just wanted to say ha-ha, despite

           your best efforts you are every second

alive in a hard-gnawing way for all who breathed you deeply in, 

     each set of lungs, those rosy implanted wings, pink balloons.

          We sigh you out into air and watch you rise like rain. 

To My Son’s Girlfriend 

I’m tempted to ask
what you see in him.
Although you probably
see the good that I see
I wonder if you realize
how much he is my handiwork,
or which of the qualities
you daydream about in class
are the ones that I take pride in,
his cordiality, for example,
or love of silliness.

It’s uncomfortable for me
to think of anyone else
loving him the way I do,
possessing him in a way
that only his mother and I
have ever possessed him,
and I can’t deny being jealous,
not so much reluctant
to share or relinquish him
as resolved to remind you
that he’s been around
longer than your love,
under construction if you will,
and that each cute trait
or whatever occurs to you
when you hear his name
I feel proprietary about,
like a woodworker
who makes a table
intending to sell it
but prays that no buyer
will recognize its worth.

Michael Milburn 

The Thing Is

Ellen Bass

to love life, to love it even

when you have no stomach for it

and everything you’ve held dear

crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,

your throat filled with the silt of it.

When grief sits with you, its tropical heat

thickening the air, heavy as water

more fit for gills than lungs;

when grief weights you down like your own flesh

only more of it, an obesity of grief,

you think, How can a body withstand this?

Then you hold life like a face

between your palms, a plain face,

no charming smile, no violet eyes,

and you say, yes, I will take you

I will love you, again. 

Harlem

Langston Hughes

What happens to a dream deferred?

      Does it dry up

      like a raisin in the sun?

      Or fester like a sore—

      And then run?

      Does it stink like rotten meat?

      Or crust and sugar over—

      like a syrupy sweet?

      Maybe it just sags

      like a heavy load.

      Or does it explode? 

Every day as a wide field, every page

Naomi Shihab Nye

1

Standing outside

staring at a tree

gentles our eyes

We cheer

to see fireflies

winking again

Where have our friends been

all the long hours?

Minds stretching

beyond the field

become

their own skies

Windows   doors

grow more

important

Look through a word

swing that sentence

wide open

Kneeling outside

to find

sturdy green

glistening blossoms

under the breeze

that carries us silently

2

And there were so many more poems to read!

Countless friends to listen to.

We didn’t have to be in the same room—

the great modern magic.

Everywhere together now.

Even scared together now

from all points of the globe

which lessened it somehow.

Hopeful together too, exchanging

winks in the dark, the little lights blinking.

When your hope shrinks

you might feel the hope of

someone far away lifting you up.

Hope is the thing ...

Hope was always the thing!

What else did we give each other

from such distances?

Breath of syllables,

sing to me from your balcony

please! Befriend me

in the deep space.

When you paused for a poem

it could reshape the day

you had just been living.