Ona GritzTHIS DANCEListen to the audio version.I've got a dance-card with the namesof my dead on it, a long list though right now it's just Danny I seek out, Danny I trust to have some afterlife wisdom since he lived with such joy. When I approach, he ink-stamps a kiss on my temple. I meant to beat this thing, he says. I think of the painting he did of a couch that was meant to hang over a couch. I think of his dyed pink Keds. It was the eighties, I remind him. No one beat it then. We slow dance in silence to the Irish ballad with his name in it, my palms resting on what was once his strong back. I could say how it gets to me, seeing his ruddy cheeks on strangers. Instead I close my eyes and sway. * * * ACROSS THE HUDSONListen to the audio version.When it happened, it was choice timein my son’s kindergarten classroom, sand table, block corner… He’d picked quiet reading. I'm told the shuddering thunder of the crash scared them, yet drew them to the window where they saw the first tower lit like a torch before the teacher had a chance to pull the shades. Earlier that morning, my boy shouldered nothing but a backpack with a super-hero on it, those cartoon muscles promising a world that could always be saved. * * * TOO SOONListen to the audio version.Someone you know is there and then she's not there.She's become a hush among the grownups when she's not a warning to never cross between cars. She's become an open eye overhead while you play with her friends. God's neighbor. A ghost girl who knows you've thought about her beautiful doll with bendable legs going to waste. She hovers in the blind spots of your room when you wake thinking, I'm still here, and when you smell the skin of your upper arms, warm and bland as oatmeal, for proof.
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