Losing Sight
You were the first person
I reached towards,
A single, shaking arm
Plunged into the thick
Fog of fresh grief.
You pulled me through
The first awful snow,
The first month on Earth
Without her;
You pulled me through
Blunt smoke in a strangers
Bedroom, ash covering
Bedspreads (which we would
Soon spread our bodies against).
You pulled me through
A dissociative dream that was
Spring semester;
Part of me fears
I will be a Junior forever.
You pulled me through
Long class lectures
And unfamiliar hallways.
You pulled me through
Relationships and wreckage,
Much of which, I’ll admit,
I created.
You grasped the horns
Of this life (a few too many times)
With all of your might,
Until that last night.
Until you were pulled
(A bit too deep)
Into the diseased drugs
Clouding our hometown.
I’m so glad I got out
Alive.
(I’m so sorry I didn’t
Have the strength
To pull you through).
Devoured
I just thought you should know
She twists every story into
Something you’d devour
Faster than a piping pretzel.
I thought you deserved to know
She doesn’t just crack us like eggs,
She has left half a dozen of us
To rot with our shells shattered.
I thought you deserved a warning:
If you don’t run for the exit now,
She will toss you out along with
The leftovers from two weeks ago,
The other ones she forgot about.
Maggie Bowyer (they/them/theirs) is a poet and the author of The Whole Story (Margaret Bowyer, 2020) and When I Bleed: Poems about Endometriosis (2021). They are a blogger and essayist with a focus on Endometriosis and chronic pain. They have been featured in Germ Magazine, Detour Ahead, Poetry 365, and others. They were the Editor-in-Chief of The Lariat Newspaper, a quarter-finalist in Brave New Voices 2016, and were a Marilyn Miller Poet Laureate.
Image by Dietmar Rabich / Wikimedia Commons / “Kerze — 2021 — 5491” / CC BY-SA 4.0