My friend Jayne says ever since she found
her boyfriend dead in his apartment and gave him CPR
that everything she eats tastes like death,
like pennies soaked in vinegar,
an unholy communion she never signed up for.
I tell her I understand, that sometimes I can hear death
or see it in whatever surrounds me.
How the year after my sister and nephew passed
I shut my ringer off, tired of wondering:
great, who else is dead? each time someone called.
Most days now, three years later,
I commune willingly with the living,
with their traffic and Netflix and birthdays
and the occasional relief of joy or rage.
But sometimes an airplane flying low wails
like a grieving mother, unbearable in its descent.
The dog snoring is a reminder that he
is still breathing and they are not.
This morning my son stumbled out the door
with his coffee, not saying anything to me
and that may be the last time I see him.
I tell my therapist that today when driving by
city workers as they stand drilling below ground,
I found myself peering over the edge,
checking to see if they were hiding a body.
She tells me this is a trauma response,
believing death is around every corner,
convinced that every terrible thing
that can happen will happen.
I decide not to tell her that she too
reminds me of death, her pale hands folded
straight across her lap, skin like a field of straw,
lipstick the color of dried blood.
She asks me if I’ve done my meditation this week,
if by the end of it I felt some relief,
if I knew in my core how beautiful
it is to be alive.

Joan Kwon Glass is a biracial Korean American who grew up in Seoul, South Korea and in Michigan. She lives near New Haven, CT. Her poems have recently been published or are upcoming in Rust & Moth, Rattle, SWWIM, Rogue Agent, South Florida Poetry Journal, Sublunary Review, FEED, and others. Her poem “Bathing Scene” was featured on the Saturday Poetry Series: Poetry as it Ought to Be, and her poem “Cartouche,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She tweets @joanpglass and you may read her previously published work at www.joankwonglass.com.