Matthew 5:4
Blessed are those who mourn,
for they will be comforted.
Take me. Take this. My wasted life and all
its bliss—the sea of your waking body
dawning with its warm grip on night’s wrist.
Your lips once curled into me. Your eyes
set me loose in a foggy lake. Loons call
to fill my deadened heart. To know
what loss is like you must lose everything,
you must lose even yourself, you said.
I am alone. Each night I lie and learn
to sing the dead back to life. Only they
can see what has been taken from me.
You are the bloodied cracks in my skin
so deep; I keep my hands together to hold
you in. Hear the damned prayers I reap.
***
Ruben Quesada is the author of Next Extinct Mammal and Exiled from the Throne of Night. His writing appears in Guernica, BOAAT PRESS, Rattle, The California Journal of Poetics, American Poetry Review, Cimarron Review, Superstition Review, and elsewhere. Find him on Twitter @rubenquesada.
