1. Freeze

My Grief balloons
And kindly freezes fast

This numb plunge
Preserves the outward shape
Stained and silent
But pain hangs behind the glass,
Its falling blade
Interrupted—

You can pay me later,
Whispers Freeze
And sinks his teeth

2. Ambush

Your ambush starts in the banal
In mirror and in echo
—Not quite, but like—
Fragments are re-formed
To startle in a different way

Now I am yanked back
Threads wrenched through the keyhole
To a staler room
For the returning of what was given away

3. Thaw

I think I can endure
The thaw,
Regard the shocked and shocking life
Beneath the flattened and the scratched.

Frozen fields yield up their gasping bodies
That I meant to come back for,
That I meant not to forget.

Here I see the blade indeed
Has dropped
And sliced it’s screaming song.
Ah yes
This is what it feels like
That clawing shriek
In flesh
Birds screech inside the bone

The general lurches
But promises to still retrieve his dead

I come back
To mess and bleeding stumps
To my poor bruised and dripping heart
Made bloated and stinging in the thaw
But thumping all the same

A poem by: Deirdre Gleeson

Images: Joshua Earle, maxx ❄