The fleeting moments of love usually metamorph into grief

Everything passes

Grief however, it sits right with me,

it accompanies me through sentiments of happiness, joy and whatever is left in the in between

It travels through my body until I self-destruct

It accompanies me until my skin is itching and my bones hurt, to the point of taken my own teeth out and swallowing them

I have felt it since I was 6 years old

when I couldn’t comprehend the weight of the word or the brutality of it

I felt it when my mom took my six chickens to be slaughtered

And put them in the fridge so she can cook them and severe them to us

Now we laugh about it over dinner

I often remember it whenever I open the fridge

I imagine them being alive in there

I still miss my chickens,

and I still miss the person my mother was

I constantly itch for a memory,

a call from the in between,

a rotten smell

Perhaps it’s the imaginary chickens that are left in the back of the fridge

I can’t speak of love because it became a distant memory that I’m not sure I even lived

Grief overlaps with the fragments of love, they are two sides of the same coin

And what is grief without the ability to love