When death comes home and puts his shoes
on your porch, kick a hole in the wall.
A small space that allows passage.
It is the aperture that we cling to,
an exit that implies a return.
It’s kinder than the hard-nailed certainty
of still bodies, stilled breath.
Better that your love is simply
gone from this world and traveling.

When Grandma went,
a series of small strokes,
you were bone tired of cleaning her.
Worn out from picking her broken sentences
up off the kitchen table.
That was at the farm, you remind her.
It was Aunt Margie.
You used to love egg salad,
and I’m your daughter. Your daughter.
Like a book on a plane,
she took remorse with her,
but she left you a dog-eared copy.
Death is more than worms,
it is unrest.
It is pain spitting pain
as we sit rocking on sorrow’s porch.

My son still waits for his daddy to come home,
although it’s been two years now.
Daddy’s resting in heaven, baby,
I assure him.
We’ll see him again someday.
My heart kicks a hole in the wall.

Jaimie Wilson is a poet and fiction writer based in Atlantic Beach, Florida. She is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College where she studied with Thomas Lux. Honors include the Lipkin Poetry Prize, a fellowship at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and a 2022-23 grant from The Community Foundation’s Black Artists Endowment. Recent fiction is online at SoFloPoJo.com.