Brennan Sprague

Elegy for the Exit

We are grieving everything always—
yesterday, I grieved for yesterday—
for the baseball field ignited by spotlights,
Exit 8 wished to the bloom of your skull.

The doctors and their tools scalpel your
thoughts and leave you bloodless. I am
grieving every twisted limb gifted to us
like they were jewels from a twilit ocean.

We are closer to dying at this very second.
Even the moon is dying. I am inconsolable.
I don’t know why the world keeps on spinning.
Asteroids are devising an ambush into our bones.

We can dive into pools, snort those bumps,
roll the windows down, feel the wind from
the spun wings of an extinct bird. But it remains—
we are grieving these moments without realizing
they are always vanishing, that we’ll cry out for them
in our speckled hours of loss. Nothing lasts—

When our suffering cradles us like babies,
cooing us lullabies while the breeze through
the curtained window croons her lonely song,
we will grieve for our dead distant mothers,
for the dead white sugared stars shimmering,
for the love we wanted but were never given.
And always in my grief I wish I were powerful,
a god—and if I was, if I ever could be—
I promise I would never make you suffer.

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Brennan Sprague (he/him) is a student at Monroe Community College majoring in creative writing. His work appears in Anti-Heroin Chic, Ink & Nebula, Barren Magazine and Gandy Dancer.