Grief Comes on a Friday at 4 p.m.

A craving for your spinach and mushroom crepes.
The plastic recipe box. Colored tabs for appetizers,
main dishes, desserts. Your left-handed back slant,
smudged ink, a greasy fingerprint—
all landing like a gasping hammer. Where have you been?
I don’t think I ever buried you. You bloomed in me
right there at the kitchen counter on a Friday at 4 p.m.
The missing wail so deep and gaping, a childhood slipped
from those protective sleeves. A kinder birth, a difference.
A truth about keeping—you never did, and I never will,
make all the good things.

*

Ellen Rowland is a writer and editor who leads small poetry workshops on craft and form. She is the author of three collections of haiku: The Echo of Silence, Light Come Gather Me and Blue Seasons, as well as the book Everything I Thought I Knew, essays on living, learning and parenting unconventionally. Her latest poetry collection, No Small Thing, was published by Fernwood Press in 2023. You can find her writing in ONE ART, Braided Way, Rock.Paper.Poem and Silver Birch Press, among others. She lives off the grid with her family on an island in Greece. Connect with her on Instagram and Facebook.