Things Without You

Koss

 Photo by Octoptimist

I spent two days alone with no phone
haunting your apartment after you died. 
Your brother was in Morocco, and I was waiting
for him to return.

The cabinets were chocked with things you won’t eat—
your kids won’t either—eggplant, mangos, the curry
I cooked for us. 
I combed the cupboards and fridge thinking

I might feel you in your choices,
in the cream and herbs of your cheese,
The astringent scent of the sink, the iron of the pot,
the expired nettles and greens. The stillness could kill

if I weren’t living dead. 
I searched your bookshelves for some clue
to the you I didn’t know. Turned the pages
as you would have, noting your hand in the margins

the poems with their heavy brackets and scribbles
we were supposed to recite to each other.
Buried myself in your papers, so thoughtfully arranged,  
your birth certificate, your psych files,
a life spent / organized / ready for death.
You didn’t have much for your age,
you were thinning towards minimalism
or preparing for the passage. You were the master

of trash, of throwing away. The bareness made
your scant ensembles more special. 

I, an accidental detective,
not sure what I’d find as I sought you.

In your closet, gifts I had sent you,
some opened, used, not used
like whelming sandalwood bars
and the love I attached to them.

Your sweet-scented drawers
cached with empty bottles of oils I’d mixed. 
I was all over the house, like you had said, the pictures,
pens, inks, the tubed paint I’d given you, 

stacked and packed like sardines in their bins
pristine, ordered, and yet, obscene.
The jarred brushes with stiff bristles
arranged in the window,
full of anticipation, somehow, hinting  
at your love and your vigor
while mirroring my emptiness.
I couldn’t take them

back and didn’t want to.
Why would one pack their own emptiness? 
I would have cherished your scuffed shoes or a scarf
or an old tattered t-shirt you loved, but nothing

was offered. The gifts though, different. Sad.
Your shoes lined near the door on a rag rug
like an arrested procession,
never again to touch your black, earth-stained feet.

Everything orchestrated, designed,
deliberate, nothing out of place, full of you
and yet empty of you, a warm asylum in the middle
of a dismal tenement, your apartment, marked

with your artwork, paint, your labor, you.
Your drawings hung high in the living room,
stories, urgent moments, captured and frozen,
staggered, yet arranged, like you.

The floor you sanded and scraped by hand,
blonde pine, knotted and iron-stained,
reflected light from open windows
while anchoring stillness. Bits of glass

stuck in cracks you shattered in anguish on Friday.
I left them there as a sort of proof
that you were here, once animated by
blood and love and motherhood and rage

and things that made you. 
I cut my hand scrambling to pick up
pieces of  broken glasses 
before you stepped on them

as you paced the floor.
A bit of glass remains in my foot,
the thing of yours I stole.

Koss is a writer and artist with an MFA from SAIC. She has work in or Diode Poetry, Cincinnati Review, Hobart, Spillway, and others. She also has a hybrid book due out in 2020 by Negative Capability Press and work in Best Small Fictions 2020 anthology and Kissing Dynamite’s Punk Anthology. Keep up with her on Twitter @Koss51209969 and Instagram @koss_singular.