Verses by @WinterLines

The coat by the door holds your shape
in the left shoulder, worn thin
from the strap of a bag you carried
eleven years to a job you hated.

In the kitchen, a mug with a chipped rim
still sits where you set it down.
I have not moved it. Dust gathers
in the ring it left on the pine.

Your boots keep the mud of last March.
I have not cleaned them. The laces
are still tied the way you tied them,
loose, impatient, half undone.

At night the radiators knock
and I listen the way I listened
for your key in the lock, that small
metal turning, the door giving way.

Grief is not a flood. It is the slow
settling of a house that no longer
holds its people, the quiet creak
of a floor remembering a foot.

The hallway clock still keeps
its small brown cough at four,
though no one wakes to hear it.

Your coat is on the hook.
I have not moved it.
The wool has gone soft at the cuffs
where your hands went in and out
ten thousand mornings.

In the drawer, your glasses
folded the way you left them,
one lens smudged still
with the print of your thumb.

Grief is not the storm.
It is the tap left running
in a room I forget to enter,
the kettle I fill for two
and then remember.

Outside, the snow does what snow does.
It covers the walk.
It does not ask permission.
It does not apologize.

I shovel it anyway,
because the neighbor's boy
has to get to school,
because the salt is there in the bucket,
because the morning is cold
and I am still here
to feel it.