Daniel McGinn

The Grief That Lives Here

I enter your room to borrow a pair of clean socks.
The hospital bed is gone, so is the medical equipment,
and you are gone. Lori has been sorting through closets

getting rid of clothing. You keep getting lighter,
smaller than your suit coats, big shirts are folded
in boxes and bags on the floor of the room

that is as empty as the absence that fills my chest
and waters my eyes. Nothing fits anymore.
I don’t know what to do with these tears for the man

who taught me not to cry. A man is not supposed to cry.
I keep the door to his room closed. I’ve seen the decline,
his body shutting down, piece by piece.

He doesn’t seem to be ready yet. He’s lost track of time.
It’s like he’s always lived in a hospital room.
I haven’t let Lori take anything to the thrift store, not yet.

Yesterday I finished a sentence by saying before my Dad died 
and my daughter corrected me saying he’s not dead yet.
I know, I said, but I forget sometimes.

Lori hangs her long black dress on a cabinet knob
in the hall and I see my father standing in the doorway,
for a moment, but it’s not him, it’s just a dress,

like the white plastic shopping bag on the floor
by the back door where my 10-pound poodle sat waiting for me.
I opened the sliding glass so she could go outside and pee.

Then I remembered she was newly dead. It was just a bag.
I keep going back to how it felt to pick up her body,
when her limbs didn’t react at all, the lightness of Pearl

as I swaddled her in a white blanket from her bed.
There was always something beautiful about that dog,
even as a corpse.

I was grateful that she no longer needed me;
that I was the one who picked her up
and carried her out to the van.

Daniel McGinn’s work has appeared in The MacGuffin, Nerve Cowboy, Misfit, and Anti-Heroin Chic along with numerous other magazines and anthologies. His most recent chapbook, Drowning the Boy won the James Tate Poetry Prize for 2021 and was published by SurVisio in Dublin Ireland. Fill Me With Birds: a free verse conversation written with Scott Ferry will be published by Meat For Tea in early 2024.