Featured Poem

• Seven of the Bonus Stages of Grief

  Callie Jennings

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  I
  There will come a day,
  trust me on this,
  when you text your housemate-enemy-crush
  to see if ze could bike by Star after hir shift
  to grab some extra chips and mixers,
  and no part of you plans what you’ll journal
  if ze’s struck and killed on that half mile.

  II
  There will come a day
  when you can half-smile at unexpected fireworks
  and unfamiliar men, when you see an empty
  stroller as just the thing it is, when you hold
  your keys like you would hold a dandelion,
  when unsurprising words for death are peacefully,
  it was her time, and in their sleep, when knocking
  wood’s a charming, dying quirk of grandmothers.

  III

  There will come a day,
  I promise you, I promise you, I promise you there will,
  when the Council of Grandmothers’ grandmothers knock
  
  and you look through the peephole, and right at the peephole
  is the fiercest crone eye of the savoriest brown.
  
  So you put on the kettle, pull out the spare blankets,
  while the softest gran coos at your cat, and the others
  dismantle your faucets and cure the slow leaks. Each
  takes her moment to tell you you’re quick enough,
  and beautiful and good enough, such a catch,
  
  and this day that’s come’s the day you can believe them.
  
  And each holds your hand in her petals of hands
  and kisses it. ‘Til your skin’s threadbare with kisses.
  
  IV
  There will come a day
  when you wake to find a trumpet on your lips,
  

  the junky crumpled trumpet of your threadbare desperate longing,
  and you woke because you blew it, and a shining trash city
  
  descends from the heavens on tag-sale rockets, landing rough
  astride the highways, just where no one wanted
  
  a city of your garbage in a grass-stained gown, and the city’s nickname
  is your seventh-grade nickname,
  
  and you take every interview, upright and unafraid.
  
  V
  There will come a day
  when you’re fearlessly surfing hot mile-up winds
  on a skyboard tied to a skeleton eagle—
  he’s not dead, just wicked metal—
  
  and you (and your unfeathered friend) wear nothing
  but your helmet and your knee pads—
  it’s not a dream, you’ve graduated, you have
  your usual teeth, you’re only pregnant if you want,
  there are no lines to know, but yeah, you’re naked—
  
  as if it’s the simplest thing to be naked
  when your body completely belongs to you,
  when you’ve made it yourself
  with your self-made hands,
  with the effort of a macaroni necklace.
  
  And the eagle, who you love, sweeps you over the ocean,
  wipes tears from your cheeks with one soft bone talon,
  and the ocean is heavy with whales again,
  and the whales are heavy with whaleness again,
  and the earth is heavy with ice at the poles,
  no part of it heavy with pain any more.
  
  VI
  There will come a day
  
  
  with only daylight
  
  
  coming down.
  
  VII
  There will come a day again. A day like nothing happened.
  And if a day won’t come, maybe a minute will?
  And if a minute won’t, then come good ghosts,
  come ancestors’ real names and yesterday’s perfume,
  
  come time-traveler’s magic trick
  you play on the child of you,
  over and over, laughing and laughing,
  trick after laugh after trick ‘til she trusts you
  
  more than anyone—you who she became—laughing
  as she toddles toward your frothing, wailing portal
  to some sweeter timeline where she might grow up okay,
  this child of you, this small laughing child. You repeat:
  
  Look, look at what I’m holding!
  Look at what’s about to vanish!

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