Christopher Crew


Your Grief as Movie Poster

Streetlights
that always saw me
don’t now.

They arrow
I follow
dragging laws
find a new
building, yours.

You stir up,
pinch the dark
around your stomach
blanket down your shoulder
I can’t help painting.

You notice,
drop it, hug me.
Still, I am there,
your knuckles knot
grief, unmake.

Your eyelid
center of mass
my shoulder
lost wax.

You don’t let,
I don’t go,
we are the frozen world.

As We Feed Our One-Week-Old The Perseids scatter themselves over to gravity light. You can't tell your hands from the peripheral flicker comet tail we’ve all spun through. I’m our slow motion, don’t know the difference between our three hour orbit around your slowly quickening mass, and the turning of the zodiac, mobile of usury and glory. All I've got is other people's stories and the deals we've made I’ll prime the syringe, you                 drink this stardust down. Speak up                 if there's more                                I should know.

We Worry, Binge-Watch Murder Mysteries we don’t see their nick your cheek surgical scissors’ beneath your tongue, At 4.9 pounds, dread (fail/feed/again) skeleton mob cement mixer locked to die in a walk-in freezer with a shadowy syndicate.

Epilogue: Technical Help

My mom can't delete the photos
from her phone and can't
take any more until it's solved.

She’s with us in Iceland
to see waterfalls, drink beer
after the boy goes to bed,
and mispronounce fjords
until I have to walk away.

First, I tell her, we'll download
them to Emily's computer.
Every photo she's taken

for the last two years flits
before us on the glass
coffee table and I realize
now what I didn't know
the summer my son was born.

That my dad would die
on Valentine's Day before
a second birthday party. That

between my sister's absurd Christmas
outfit and a basket of hand-painted eggs,
my mother's breath would hitch
at the skyline from the hospital room,
my dad, blurry and poorly lit in a gown

and then the spring would continue.
My son trying to eat a squeegee.
A mountain goat on the Olympic peninsula.

Her breath would hitch and I would say,
I know. And then I would trouble myself
with the computer, and fail
to delete anything. Fail
to restore the ability to take more

pictures. Fail, also, to hug my mother.
Fail to acknowledge that I
                                             can’t fix anything.

Christopher Crew is working on teaching his child the difference between a coin slot and a CD player. In the meantime, he hauls a bike trailer up Seattle's many explicable hills. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as The Sycamore Review, The Marlboro Review, Natural Bridge and Poplorish.
 
 
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