Ask me not of Grief.

For I have been burnt by its friendly fire

with blood and bits of oozing mortal flesh

spun flaky and ashen by its biting cold breath.

That was in the past.

Grief dug its teeth into me once more in the Pandemic

with my mother gone into hallowed ground

On the tenth of December twenty-twenty.

Those interlinked circles,

those zeroes in the last month of that year

became black holes in my brain

With my mother gone

Without a kiss,

without a last embrace,

without the promise of forgiveness and grace.

Rebecca Haque is a Killam Scholar and independent educator. She is a poet, writer, and translator affiliated with Multi-Ethnic Literature of the World [#MELOW], Asia-Pacific Writers & Translators Association [#APWT], and New York Writers Workshop [#NYWW].