RM Grant

RM Grant

Three Scenes in a Hospice

i. Working back, it wasn’t a particularly painful death in truth, you looked a little like light in an old, dusty bulb fading pale and creamy

ii. “I don’t want to have to come visit you in the hospital one day”, she yelled, while he smoked a cigarette. Her words burned like acid on the young psychonaut’s tongue -want to have toin the end he was forced to swallow every hope of becoming the nothing he knew he was

iii. when all of the heat had gone out of you when you had turned soft and cold (a fact your husband remarked upon as the wheels came round to carry you out past the bathroom where my father was hiding his tears from me; out past the dusty hospice window where early evening had come to dress herself)

a young nurse turned to your son and said:

“sign here, we’d like her eyes. You can keep the heart, we’ve no use for it. No use for dust or bulbs or light or salvaged memories. No use for any of it”

tender//forever

we danced together beneath a dimming sky and never once looked up. as if by looking we might cause the light to die a little quicker,

or cause us each to vanish in the dark, as though we didn’t both already reflect one another entirely.

later, as we lay on your bed in the heat of July, in the dark, pushing back against gravity, the way stars do, you handed me the ingredients for light that we crushed in our cores like hydrogen, making heavier elements; a meal cooked for eternity from temporary things

by August I’ll be as tender as an eons-cooked lamb

please, never forget that night we cycled through the city and the moment I lost sight of you and forgot to feel fear; only the warmth and infinite light from the sun you baked inside my chest

RM Grant