We do not wake from love like sleep
or rise from it a fiery bird out of the ashes,
but like the dying rise from a bed
they know they will not return to.

There is no ceremony to this loneliness,
the quiet clang of spoons in a drawer,
the tink of glasses in a half-empty cupboard,
the breathless hush of rooms unspoken to for days.

We have been dying for years, but you are still here,
lying next to me, staring at a phone that never rings,
folding laundry like winding a shroud.
Our voices brittle as x-rays, the truth lit up in bone.

I remember you once said, that love was
an orchard, ripe and impossible to own.
Now the trees bend like old men, and no fruit grows
only the slow failure of systems:

A forgetting of rituals.
The untouched coffee.
A bed made for no one.
The empty kiss.
The steady subtraction of each other’s names
from the future.

This was the death that took the longest—
the one that breathed between us
long after we stopped touching,
long after we said we loved each other
in the past tense,
even after we had buried the years in our separate plots.

Previously published online and in print in Third Wednesday Magazine