Savannah Cooper
In Memoriam
hold a funeral for all the lost years. bury my former life
in a grave I can visit, beneath a stone I can touch. grief
without a place to go feels too heavy.
buy flowers for her, whisper apologies to empty earth.
wish I’d known better, wish I hadn’t roamed down
that road for so long.
now that I’m here, myself again, or maybe for the first
time, it feels wrong to let her pass in silence, not to mark
time’s stretching with eulogy.
she did her best with what she had, made a world out
of crumbling sand, and for that I owe her. for trying,
believing, somewhere deep, somewhere beyond thought,
that I would one day breathe free.
Blind Faith
Dreams littered with ragged country
…………………….roads. Strange cities in the dark. Gaping holes
in fences. Piles of gray snow. Brutalist
…………………….architecture. I thought myself in love after
dreaming we kissed. I thought myself dead
…………………….before waking to dim outlines of all these
things I chose and know. Hand on collarbone,
…………………….inches away from my fluttering, faltering heart.
My first instinct always is to believe. A hard
…………………….habit to break, blind faith, near impossible.
I forget sometimes that everyone did not learn
…………………….the way I did, hand on hymnal, knees
crossed at ankles. I swallowed the truth
…………………….as easily as pale crackers passed around
for communion, traces stuck in my molars,
…………………….washed down with a shot of grape juice
watered to make the bottle last longer. Stacked
…………………….cups behind the pew. Grocery list on the back
of a bulletin. Flip to each verse and convince
…………………….myself that I feel holy, subdued and changed.
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Savannah Cooper (she/her) is a Pushcart Prize nominated poet. Her work has been previously published in more than thirty journals, including Parentheses Journal, Midwestern Gothic, and Mud Season Review.