DEATH Poem: Grief (Fresh ed.), by Ivee Baker

I shed my skin
The pain left
in shriveled
crinkled
apricot curtain trails.
I hobble down the aisle,
reluctant,
over the thresholds
of time,
of growth.

New skins shrink.
They aren’t as worn
as the old
withered, tethered
familiar ones.
They are tight,
bloated,
ready to burst
blisters

Molting has left me naked.
Bare and shivering and pink,
a vulnerable jelly mass,
as durable as rotting flesh.
I sink into the new,
but it is so heavy;
it surrounds me
swallows me asunder,
slipping into
a subterranean tube,
and suddenly i am lost
in its labyrinthine,
new,
overwhelmingly alien
depths.

my lungs ache
burn
screaming
and dirt fills my throat;
the sand scrapes
granular streaks
as I’m force-fed the

New:
an anxious, incendiary
burnt eggshell path.
I don’t have time for the old.
I’m so deeply drowning
in the quicksand,
the gelatinous
viscous molasses
of ever-evolving new,
the old is occluded
(above ground)
(above me)

I cannot feel
solar warmth
on my lowly fingertips.
The gleaming old,
its painfully golden beams,
cannot penetrate
the thick
gloopy
pool of new.