It’s not enough to know that I can only save you with my bare hands,
so I dig in deep, down to the bone, my knees sunk in your sadness.
I grab handfuls of it and throw it to the wind like ashes
after a loved one has been cremated. When Angela died we left
thirty-seven casseroles on her back porch over a span of two weeks.
Now, with her gone, there’s no one left to fix the leaky faucet
or eat the rest of the stale cereal, so we make jokes
about how she wanted to name all her cats Wayne or George
and the way she was fascinated by glassblowing
to the point of obsession. I press my mouth to your mouth
and kiss until you are so full of light that it turns into sorrow,
sorrow I try to blow out like the soft white skin of albino dandelions.
I know you miss Angela; I can hear you crying in the shower.
No amount of soap could ever clean away all that grief.
And sometimes I come in to find you washing out your mouth
with shampoo because you’ve forgotten
that you have hair
and that hair is washed with shampoo
while mouths can only be washed out with apologies.