Anniversary
And January resumes
as its first snow falls for you,
my nose rises to you. Are you there?
Do you see
the year’s ashes shedding at
my feet? See me
and the days getting high
by myself in stranger ways
and the grief of work when I am tired
because I make a mistake
and if it were anyone else, I’d just
tell them, it’s okay, it’s okay
and how I break my own heart when I
talk to someone
and I’d talk to them again
but they can walk away
and suffer the lack of you who hesitated
to hear my wicked past
and to speak yours too. Though
now I need permission to continue
and trust in time it will get better.
Forget you. Love you
but leave you behind. And all this sorrow
swells in me like euphoria.
Haro Lee lives in New Zealand with her grandmother. Her poems appear in Michigan Quarterly Review, The Offing, Thimble Lit Magazine, and elsewhere. She was the recipient of Epiphany Magazine’s Breakout 8 Writers Prize. You can find her @pilnyeosdaughter.
The Mantle 