Today's poem is by Darius Stewart

Elegy
        for Jeremy Spring

Each day I spin yarns around my heart.
Lulled to sleep without a body to warm

me, not even a dint in the mattress hints
I've missed a thousand habitual nights of coupling.

If the days weren't so filled with birds'
quick-beat flapping, I may have forgotten the quieter

tenor of fish leaping, flopping mid-air at sea, how
this is the way in which surviving the dead becomes an act

of unkindness. Nodding politely to a woman
carrying her child on hip, I must admit the world does,

indeed, continue to revolve: the moon
cycles & tides excavate rubble, washes it

ashore, I know, just as I know dinner for two
is too much dinner for one. Half the equation is missing—

though my memory of you survives:
you sunning yourself those afternoons hoping

if you perspired toxins would scatter like a flock of crows.
This is how I like to remember you—

not a mattress worn smooth, nor dishes filling a cabinet
with dust. But the sun ravaging you with light,

those birds lost in your body's cast shadow.

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Copyright © 2023 Darius Stewart All rights reserved
from Intimacies in Borrowed Light
Eastover Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission