By Stephanie Coyne DeGhett

We meet near the bunches of tulips
and bags of apples, a pair of women
whose old professor husbands have died:
our first Christmas in a frozen snow bank
without them is behind us, the northern spring
is near, but the path to it is still snowing over.

I’m rattled in the way that only
chance encounters in a grocery aisle
can undo me—my slipping armload
of groceries is going to spill
and while I hold the red tulips
in their slick transparent sleeve
yet more tightly—it’s all going to cascade:
I want very much to get this right.

I want to staunch her grief with my own
for this moment: no sense us both suffering,
take a minute’s breather—I’ve got this thing
covered for the both of us is what I want to say—
but for all the intimacy of loss,
we are just long-time acquaintances.

A woman—ornithologist husband dead
decades ago—moves past us:
the Academic Bereavement Society
has called a surprise meeting in produce
and my hold on myself is getting more slippery.
Three women walk into a grocery store,
I think, but the joke won’t tell itself.

Clumsy with grief, catching at the flowers,
catching at words—I think to settle for saying
hang on because that’s what I’m trying to do
with this goddamn sleeve of red tulips, just trying,
for this moment, to make it all the way to the register.
In a few minutes I catch a glimpse of her
heading out the automatic door:
one of us through, I think—and take heart.

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Stephanie Coyne DeGhett is a poet and fiction writer who writes and teaches along the Canadian border. She has had pieces in The Missouri Review, The Writer’s Chronicle, and Southern Humanities Review, among others.