GRIEF CHRONICLE

Every spring the canal fills with your hair, wound
tight like loss. You drained yourself into a field

dressed in tulip: less lit, more wandering bloom.
A salt lick in drought says stone, sediment, thirst.

Your eyes rivered like fish. If there is buried
carnage, count on me to find it.

Stefanie Kirby lives and writes along Colorado’s Front Range. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best New Poets, and Best of the Net, and appear or are forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, The Maine Review, wildness, Passages North, Poet Lore, The Offing, and elsewhere.