Today's poem is by Kate Fox

Make No Mistake
       

You are the company misery loves.
Or at least does not neglect.
You take your pain seriously enough
to feel it like a missing leg, grieve for it
as your parents grieved for starving children
or birth defects—a curiously abstract loss—
but somehow relieved through
the March of Dimes or UNICEF.

Yet somehow loss took shape in those evenings
that trudged from house to house, collecting hope
from even the poorest of neighbors—took
the form of animals sturdy enough to follow
strangers into the street and come back,
their heads misshapen by the asphalt.
And later how they simply

disappeared, like the man who
said he would call and didn't,
and how you had him dead in Alabama,
Tennessee. How he, too, had simply
disappeared, and then, how you had wished
him dead, instead of merely fallible.

It isn't as if you could have loved
and chose not to.

It isn't that sort of choice at all.

Copyright © 2025 Kate Fox All rights reserved
from The Company Misery Loves
Sheila-Na-Gig Editions
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission