Ubuntu by Theodore Mersault

You are on a bus when they call you

The conversation all hyphens and ellipses

ums and ahs like flicking christmas lights

Stringing together platitudes

—She’s dead

The mom you’d never had

Now the mom you’ll never have

And you stare through the window and the raindrops on it

From here, I-25 looks like it was painted by an impressionist

As a means of coping.

Your stop comes and goes

The rain takes eighth rests under overpasses

And your mind wobbles, soundless

A coin about to stop spinning

Tragedies have half lives but no deaths

Always going, never gone

And underneath losing yourself in this loss

Are all the losses you can’t seem to lose

Every ache you’ve ever felt fighting for space

In the static hum of your chest

—why can’t the things we survive just die?