If Grief Were a Lover, I'd Write Love Letters by Amelia Lenz (16, Georgia)

I wish I knew how to capture the feeling 
of afternoon sun warming the skin of my bare shoulders
and the taste of birthday cake and ice cream as 
children ran under foot, dragging red balloons behind them.
I wish I could grasp happiness like a firefly,
and preserve it as a flower in these pages.

---

Instead, I am a taxidermist.

Let me tell you the way,
roots planted themselves inside of you
and spread like rot as they curled around your organs
A gentle embrace -- like a chokehold.
Do you remember the way they leached life out of you,
until all that was left was dust?
I do.

We write what we know,
or maybe to figure out what that is exactly.
We write the stories buried deep in our bones,
etched upon the inner workings of our ribcage.
We write love poems as children, 
because we so desperately wish to encapsulate being loved.

It’s funny how grief can feel like love.

I know the curve of her hips
and the tenderness of slender fingers,
hooking themselves into my belt loop.
I know there is a freckle on the back of those hands
that is really two freckles side-by-side,
making a singular venn diagram,
on the place where her thumb meets her wrist.
I know the sound of her high pitched laugh 
and the lullaby her mother used to sing on nights
where rain sunk into the dirt and the sky screamed.

It's an intimate sort of knowing.

Like a lover. Like a sin.