Love Letters

after Megan O’Rourke

October 28th, 2005

Dear Emma,

I write with

hands that shake and crack open, wishing and wanting

to hold his face—

My fear to blink unbearable, my eyes

craving countenance

Ah, to see, to see!

His chest rising and falling with the humming of

the only world I knew

now in the sky—dark purple, turning black and then back

to blue—his eyes—

he came after me, from me, left before me

by choice, by choice! And never—

never again to hear his voice—impossible!

And now, as long as I breathe, to love will be

to feign something I no longer see

worth in my chest rising and falling, singing

his memory that lives in lungs, beneath my

paper-thin skin, beneath all that is fragile

and all that is breaking, and I am still and will always be thinking

of forever, of never, of ever

February 4th, 2015

Dear Emma,

I write with

restless hands that are bruised and battered, tired

from the everyday work that is surviving,

I have found fear in every freedom

I’ve turned to, yet

I still believe in survival, though our

boy is gone, though our love went

with him, I think there is a sun

waiting to rise

in his wake.

November 23rd, 2020—your 35th birthday.

Dear Son,

I write with a heart that is mostly stone and at least half done

with beating, filled more of anger than blood and blood than love

my dear son I write with ribs that are tilted trees

and beneath them a garden

of all the things

I’d hoped you’d be—

Not never, ever, and always forever

Dad