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      June 12, 2018Call If You Need MeSonia Greenfield

      I can’t claim to know why,
      but for me it was circumstantial—
      hormone dump after miscarriage
      plus my only child’s diagnosis
       
      had my drunk face lit by a screen
      detailing ways to jettison this failure
      of a body. And because I could not
      believe in God, I harbored no notion
       
      I would still get to see that child
      as a man, so here I am. It was that
      and the instinct for preservation,
      instinct to stay, o please stay. Don’t
       
      say these are dark days, they are
      no worse than windows of a copy store
      plastered with missing person’s posters
      that Christmas after 9/11, no sadder
       
      than thousands of Teddy Bears sent
      to Newtown. I think too much
      already about how each day leaches
      a little magic and how my son
       
      won’t watch a video of lava rolling
      down a hill because he’s afraid
      to see people die when yesterday
      he knew it only as a slow pour of fire.
       
      For him, I will always stay longer.
      I will climb hand-over-hand this
      failed body up the side of a hill,
      or I will hang a bird feeder.
       
      And when the wren with the red head
      comes to feed, I will ask myself
      red like what? then try to come up
      with something better than blood.

      from Poets Respond

      Sonia Greenfield

      “It’s always a shock to hear of someone’s suicide—in this case, Bourdain’s. We always want to know why, as if some sort of knowing would make sense of it; however, suicide is such a deeply personal choice, and most deeply personal choices can’t be made sense of even with the people we’re close to. I know many of us have thought of it, which makes Bourdain’s death feel a little more intimate.”