I am searching for the language to describe the feeling of a future being gone.
The ways in which cancer robs words, robs next week, next month, next year. Robs plan-making, robs a body of potentials.
This is not the time to be positive.
Allow for grief, allow for anger.
Is it thievery? Theft? Or slicing? A person could imagine meat now. A dog running into an old-time butchery, stealing the prize steak. The butcher himself holding the meat cleaver high, white apron bloody, yelling, chasing the dog into the alleyway. Future lost profit.
Not a rug swept away. An entire floor.
Birds here for the season.
The abrupt “off” of a heat-relieving fan.
Such quiet.
In bed, all imaginings ending with “no.” Remaining awake.
When listening to clocks, counting.
Music in the entryway and briefly the scent of perfume—
—
hollered greetings hill to hill,
strangers.
What strangling might mean if a throat was held by air.
Absence.
Remaining awake to think of it
*Link to the Emily Dickinson poem from which this title is taken.
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Pink Stinks 