By Sophia Venables

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If you’ve lost someone, may the specifics of this poem be relatable.

You cannot reschedule 
grief 
like a lunch date—

this morning, 
brimming with
expectations

(and you’re
already
running late)

please pencil in 
at your earliest [in]convenience
this unwelcome 

guest—the fog that
swirls,
gnawing your veins

making fossils from
your larynx and
quicksand from your

ribcage,
stalagmites sprung
from your shoulders and  

valleys drilled into
your collarbone.
Only then,

with the earth now 
sunk 
into each 

poisoned pore,
will mourning smile
and ask,

if you would like
to do this
again, sometime soon.

Process

This poem is a product of the grief I was working through after losing loved ones in 2021 and 2022. One of my favorite poems, “Valentine for Ernest Mann” by Naomi Shihab Nye, begins with: “You can’t order a poem like you order a taco.” While her poem continues on as a love letter to poetry, my poem, which starts with a similar structure, becomes a grievance letter to grief. I wrote this poem to release the weight of the grief I was feeling, and when I revisited it with my mentor, Jennifer, we polished the language to emphasize different ways grief feels in the body. I also wanted to explore how the arrival of grief changes everything, which resulted in my choice to create a tone shift in the fifth stanza, after the second em dash.