Recipes for Grief

[yachiru]

Title: Recipes for Grief
Prompt: Without You
TW: Death


I don't want to write about grief anymore

I don't want to write about how it fits like an old jacket
that I keep having to patch the elbows on
how every year the shoulders tighten
buttons fall in the same patterns as falling leaves
from old bark trees
we used to make angels under

I don't want to write about all of the women dying in winter
my grandmother and mother gifting me Christmas ashes
how they sold her underwear in yellow plastic tubs
how her jewelry rubbed green
how she never got the funeral she wanted
gilded and grand

I don’t want to write about how I killed a mouse once
after its foot was caught in a snaptrap
how it woke me at three in the morning
frantic death squeaks all trapped creatures must make

I don't want to say that it made me remember my mother dying
on that dialysis machine
tubes pumping her veins clean
though never enough to counteract weeks of sin

There must be a recipe
for grief
something like tea using dust instead of leaf
filter through sleep
steep in water
let it wash me clean