When I Look Up at the Sky, My Eyes on Your Grave by Elly Katz

When I Look Up at the Sky, My Eyes on Your Grave

For Daniella Moffson, killed at age 21 in a bus crash
after volunteering with Columbia’s Global Brigades in Honduras.
As in life, her legacy illuminates her giving nature.

Your death runs through me like my stroke;
whomever I become silhouettes in your color.

I am the world’s smallest stone.
Out the window, a sparrow the size of a pull tab.
He dispatches a message— all this loss, and you hanker for more nectar?
I am in a graveyard surrounded by words of pebbles.
Who would you have been beyond 2016, Daniella Moffson?
An esteemed oncologist? A beloved wife? A spider spinning silk to nowhere?
The cerulean at her temples once blossom, now wilt.
My eyes a fog of feeling.

*

At 27, verging towards a doctorate at Harvard, Elly Katz went for a mundane procedure to stabilize her neck. Somehow, she survived what doctors surmised was unsurvivable: a brainstem stroke secondary to a physician’s needle misplacement. In the wake of the tragedy, she discovered the power of dictation and the bounty of metaphor. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in the Stardust Review, the Sacramento Literary Review, the Amsterdam Review, and many others. Her first collection of creative nonfiction, From Scientist to Stroke Survivor: Life Redacted is forthcoming from Lived Places Publishing in Disability Studies (2025). Her first collection of poetry, Instructions for Selling-Off Grief, is forthcoming from Kelsay Books (2025).