Grief-Fed

Sarah Fawn Montgomery
| poetry

 

I swallow my grief
like a confection,

tongue the sweet until
it too disappears

like polar ice and the bears,
bees spiraling to oblivion,

my father wasting in his sick
bed while the family scrolls

for the latest disaster,
cat memes and gluten-

free everything. I worry
the treat but the shape still

holds like a ghost
and I wonder if you can lie

to something suspended
between dead and alive

the way the world seems half-
nostalgic, the other focused

on the future like how I freeze
in the kitchen again,
remembering my father
singing about tigers escaping

the Earth’s gravity to fly
on the springs in their tails,

plenty of bears and bees,
all that sickly honey,

like the syrup he poured
over my pancakes,

as if the sweet could go on forever.

Sarah Fawn Montgomery is the author of Halfway from Home (Split/Lip Press), Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir (The Ohio State University Press) and three poetry chapbooks. She is an associate professor at Bridgewater State University.

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