This is a poem I wrote in November 2015 after the death of a friend. The image in my head while I wrote was his mother’s face. I know that will be sad—while you read each line here—but I think it’s beautiful and important, too. There are other images of misery in this poem, but that is the one that made me write it.

Cover Your Ears with Your Hands

Misery is loud.
It’s the screams of the coyote
In the middle of some
Vagrant forest in the center
Of the sometimes desperate Rocky
Mountains;
It’s the screams of the coyote
Whose voice has grown too
Hoarse to scream. He lies down
In the grass and whimpers:
The screams of the coyote left
To suffer.
Loud like the thunder rolling off
The waves of an ocean who has
Felt the crushing remorse of taking
So many lives of mothers, pirates,
Children and their slowly sinking men.
Loud like the lion licking away
The pain
From another needle’s point,
With the taste of the mouse still
On his lips. Loud like the liquor
On your tongue.
Loud like the woman
Who has felt too much today and lies
Voiceless screaming pouring out
Her eyes and leaking into the carpet:
A mess she’ll have to clean again.
Loud like the splintered bottle
Pushed by the tension in the air that
Leads to filthy clinking echoing in the
Fog of leftover silence.
Loud like the sobbing shoulders heaving
In the corners of your rooms, under
Blankets and in closets: shoulders
Shaking behind locked bathroom doors and
The alleys behind the bar you work weekends;
Shaking until your jaw aches; shaking.
Loud like the cracks in your lips and the
Indentations in your knee caps from all the
Nights spent on bent bones screaming
Into your palms for the world to be
Different.
Loud like the liquor on his tongue and the
Gasp between imagined pauses in sentences
That are too long to separate into coherence;
Loud.
Loud like the lion; and the dying coyote
And the night you spent screaming at your
Ceiling, for peace.

Stay gold,
Sabrina