After days of deep grief the air feels like ocean. But no amount of swimming lessons readied you for this fall beyond sight. You try to leave the house without ripping open. Walk the dog. Send mail. But everything is a trip wire reminder of what has been lost. The broccoli— what you coaxed him towards as a child. An orange— he ate so many. Model airplanes and finger paints. His favorite kind of bread lines up in neat rows at the grocery store. One whole row has been removed. At the back of the shelf, bread bags fall into one another, barely propped up, shaped around emptiness. Your hand will never stop reaching toward what he loved. The empty row will never be refilled. A space you’ll keep stumbling over with heart and eyes. Hands that want to busy themselves, send a letter, twist over and over on the heavy shore.
Emilie Lygren is a nonbinary poet and educator whose work is grounded in curiosity and reverence. She’s taught writing in a variety of contexts: classrooms, research stations, graduate programs, parks, libraries, and beyond. Emilie calls on her years of experience as an outdoor educator and curriculum developer to help students connect with themselves, one another, and the places they find themselves in. Emilie’s poems have appeared in numerous journals and magazines, including the Alaska Quarterly Review, Wayfarer Magazine, and Crab Creek Poetry Review (where her poem was a semifinalist for the Crab Creek Poetry Award). Her first book of poetry, What We Were Born For, won the Blue Light Book award was chosen by the Young People’s Poet Laureate as a monthly book pick from the Poetry Foundation. Emilie is currently an outdoor educator, a professor of creative writing, a poet in the schools, and at work on an anthology of poems on mental health for teens and youth. She lives on Coast Miwok land in San Rafael, California. Find more of her work and words at emilielygren.com.
