After You Left by Lisa Low

After You Left

I have lived my life alone since then.
Raising our children alone. Waving them
onto the bus alone. Facing them nights
and mornings alone. I wish I could say
how happily we played, cold to your loss.
How we ran to the snow when you left
to roll another man with black raisin eyes
and a carrot nose, but six-year-old Sam
hid his face when you left and lay like
a plank on his bed and four-year-old Julia
spilled a mountain of pills on me where
I lay on the carpet, crying, and ever since
then we have plucked our backyard daisies
clean, saying we love him, we love him not.

*

Lisa Low’s essays, reviews, and interviews have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, The Boston Review, and The Adroit Journal. Her poetry has been shortlisted for Ploughshares and is published or forthcoming in many literary journals, among them Hopkins Review, Pleiades, One Art, Conduit, Louisiana Literature, Pennsylvania English, and Southern Indiana Review. Her chapbook, Late in the Day, is forthcoming in July 2025 from Seven Kitchens Press.