Saga of the Grief Journal

Merridawn Duckler

I.

I drew an angry, enraged face in the grief journal
then covered it up with a kind face
then covered them both with the kind
of face that pretends it is not angry and enraged.

I wrote on every line of the grief journal
but I left all the T’s uncrossed
because I am not a Christian
and I only kept the diacritic dot because of “tittle.”

Tears in the grief journal
caused the binding to un-glue
which points to a defect in the manufacture
as well as a metaphor too large to copy.

II.

I met the grief journal and slept with the grief journal
and had breakfast with the grief journal and learned all about
the grief journal and met the friends of the grief journal
(but not the mother of the grief journal) and was often bored
with the grief journal but acknowledged the grief journal
alleviated my loneliness and then I fought with the grief journal
and had fantastic make up sex with the grief journal and felt closer
to the grief journal than to anyone ever and when I married
the grief journal and had children with the grief journal I
knew years of joy with the grief journal except I became
more fearful of love than ever in a way because as I held the sleeping grief journal
I wondered what would happen to me when the grief journal died.

III.

I cannot bless the grief; I am no god.
But I can bless this idea: that somehow
all of this goes on, and somehow I am in it.

© Merridawn Duckler

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Merridawn Duckler is a poet and playwright from Portland, Oregon. Recent poetry in TAB: Journal of Poetry and Poetics, Fifth Wednesday Journal, Blast Furnace forthcoming from Zone 3, The Offing, and others. She was runner-up at the Arizona Poetry Center judged by Farid Matuk and a finalist for the Sozoplo Fiction Fellowship. Her play in verse was in the Playwright Festival of the Manhattan Shakespeare Project. Fellowships/awards include Writers@Work, NEA, Yaddo, Squaw Valley, SLS in St. Petersburg, Russia, merit scholarship Southampton Poetry Conference with Billy Collins, and others. She’s an editor at Narrative and the international philosophy journal Evental Aesthetics. Follow her @MerridawnD.