Snow clings to granite,
your gravestone in February,
two birthdays past your life,
seen through a photograph,
grainy and digital,
from two hundred miles away.
Layers of ice
crust bouquets
of plastic and fabric
I brought each month
on the day you died
to work through my grief.
That was the first year,
when I lived close—
five minutes from the cemetery.
When denial clouded
my life, your grave
became my anchor.
In pictures, you’re forever thirty-three;
this day can only mark
the passage of another year stolen.
Emily Jo Scalzo received her MFA in Fiction from California State University, Fresno in 2010. She has worked with writers Lance Olsen, Doug Rice, Corrinne Hales, John Hales, David Anthony Durham, Patricia Henley, and Steve Yarbrough. Her work has been published in Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, Deep Water Literary Journal, and Ms. Fit Magazine and is forthcoming at Eunoia Review and 50 Haikus.
Categories: Poetry
Tags: e-zine, Emily Jo Scalzo, ezine, Fourteen Months After the Motorcycle Crash, hyperbole, longing, melancholy, melancholy hyperbole, poem, poet, poetry, poets, submit
Melancholy Hyperbole 