April Messier
Permission
You weren’t ashes,
when I watched you
sleep for four days, counted
your breath, slept between
giving out morphine,
picked asters
between panic attacks and
played your favorite songs.
On a phone, a nurse
said you won’t go until
I tell you,
so I whispered in your ear
my first sentence, as consent.
An hour later I was only one in—
and you are
ashes that I mind,
shelved
in a conceit that right now
coaxes,
loosed
and somehow stored like
waiting from a vantage.
I don’t hear your voice now
but you still think about me,
relive the life you left
I reappear.
April Messier is currently finishing up her Bachelor’s degree in English at the University of Maine in Orono—focusing on poetry and poetics. Her recent work includes a finished manuscript of poetry and prose that explores poetry’s roots in ritual and prayer. Through her work she tries to imagine how poetry may have existed prehistorically, and what that means for poetry today. After graduating this Spring, she hopes to pursue a MA in English at the University of Maine. When she’s not in school April manages an organic vegetable farm in Camden, ME.