2026 Poem: The Shape It Leaves, by Riley Jorgensen

Performed by Val Cole

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The Shape It Leaves

Grief does not arrive like thunder.
It seeps
through the quiet crack of an ordinary morning,
in the space where a voice should be.

It teaches absence its own language:
a chair pulled out but never used,
a name that echoes longer than it’s spoken,
a phone you still expect to ring.

At first, it is heavy
a stone you carry in both hands,
impossible to set down
without feeling like you’ve let them fall again.

Later, it changes shape.

It becomes the way you pause
before telling a story they would have loved,
the way sunlight feels almost like permission
and almost like betrayal.

People will say it softens
but that’s not quite true.
It sharpens into memory,
into moments so clear they almost breathe.

And somehow, you go on.

Not because it’s easier,
but because love, unfinished,
refuses to end where a life did.

So grief stays
not as a wound alone,
but as a quiet proof:

that something mattered enough
to leave a shape
even after it was gone.