11-14-2025, 12:14 AM
Phone a Friend
As the years pass like tiny moths,
I find myself eaten away
not from her chemo,
her staging food like performance art,
as I lost her between bites
and found myself hollowed out.
Dance shoes in the trunk,
private jokes that never land,
punchlines forgotten,
timing gone.
She was the first I lost,
and every loss after her
sliced off something I mistook
as a part of myself.
I keep dying in fragments,
an installment plan
of becoming someone
neither of us would recognize.
As the years pass like tiny moths,
I find myself eaten away
not from her chemo,
her staging food like performance art,
as I lost her between bites
and found myself hollowed out.
Dance shoes in the trunk,
private jokes that never land,
punchlines forgotten,
timing gone.
She was the first I lost,
and every loss after her
sliced off something I mistook
as a part of myself.
I keep dying in fragments,
an installment plan
of becoming someone
neither of us would recognize.
The secret of poetry is cruelty.--Jon Anderson