How you do it amazes me.

You take all of your feelings and bunch them up and scrape them raw and keep them close to your heart,

But you keep Marilyn, the mother who stabbed that icy knife into your chest, in the box farthest away from you.

You can talk about her jewelry, and the books she never returned, but you swear that it’s all acid in your soul, to still think about her.

You don’t know what to do with the ironic boquets – how can they harvest something so beautiful to celebrate such a terrible occasion?

So dreary.

You swear the bright colors and the smell of the lilies and the hydrangeas are therapeutic.

But you won’t take any, for the house that you live in that isn’t yours.

Your Garden of Eden is complete without the flowers.

You talk about Eve, and Samson and Delilah.

Men are stupid, you say.

You nave not yet healed, not at all.

You’re content with the funeral thank-you cards that will pile up and never shrink,

Talking about the day that no one could take it – they had to pick out her clothes.  They had to dress her dead body for the box.

He’s organizing her life now that she’s dead, because she put his life in the tiniest box when she could.

Marilyn bought a new wedding ring when the Chemo deigned to eat her soul.