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      September 16, 2016Nancy GomezDeadbeat

      You died the year our youngest son turned one.
      Eyes closed, mouth slack, hair splayed
      around your face like an electric fence,
      a rusty crown on an otherworldly prince.
       
      It was the final affront, the end
      to the prolonged “fuck you” of your short life—
      leaving all those promises you made eternally unfulfilled,
      and me with two needy children tethered
      to the unsteady buoy of my heart, all of us holding on
      for dear life, riding out the riptides
      of utility bills and rent and getting food on the table.
      Hand-me-downs and homework.
      All those things you couldn’t help with.
       
      I am still emptying out the dumpster of our years together.
      Old hypodermics and empty bottles,
      shoeboxes filled with notebooks and guitar picks.
      I am still finding the landmines you left.
      Like today when our daughter turned her head
      and I saw the dimple that used to bloom
      in a crescent moon on the right side of your smile.
      And that familiar grief moved through me
      like blood stains spreading across sheets.
       
      And all that love comes rushing back
      in a sucker punch ringing of fresh starts.
      And gratitude. I remember
      those years when you were still alive
      and always around
      to haunt us.

      from #52 - Summer 2016

      Nancy Miller Gomez

      “Poetry helps me to make emotional sense of my life. Each poem is a struggle to clarify something I don’t yet understand. ‘Deadbeat’ came to me with the line, ‘you’re more romantic now that you’re dead.’ That line is no longer in the poem. What remains is the idea that we carry the ghosts of those we’ve loved both before and after they’ve died. ‘Supernova’ grapples with my experience of grief as something both tangible and immeasurable.”

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