"It's Hard to Think about Anything but to Breathe"

Jill Michelle

Jill Michelle (she/her) teaches at Valencia College in Orlando, Florida. Her latest poems appear/are forthcoming in DMQ Review, untethered magazine, Please See Me, The Elevation Review, and Drunk Monkeys. Recent anthology credits include The Book of Bad Betties (Bad Betty Press, UK) and Words from the Brink (Arachne Press Limited, UK).

“In 2017, I began writing song-inspired poems for a collection entitled Certain Songs, exploring the relationship between music and memories to create pieces, much like ekphrastic works derive inspiration from visual art. The collection itself was inspired by the song of that name by The Hold Steady, specifically Craig Finn’s lyric, ‘Certain songs—they get so scratched into our souls.’ As an organizing thread, all of the poems in this series are acrostics that spell out the song titles that sparked the pieces, and the titles are fragments of the song lyrics. ‘It’s Hard to Think about Anything but to Breathe’ was written in response to ‘When U Love Somebody’ by Fruit Bats.”

Weary—that’s how you appear, caught in memory, the moment before you
Hear me shiver, shift beneath the ER’s crepe-thin, paper blanket. Instantly, an
Encouraging smile blossoms; your spine straightens like a daffodil piercing spring,
Numb to winter’s chill, the clockwork screams, this morning’s blood-stained sheets.

Under your green gaze, apologies die on my lips; my body, that traitor who just

Let a second child slip into the riptide of grief, awaits its trial, beached here
On the rickety gurney, ready for blame, not this tenderness that suddenly fades the I-
V’s pinch across my wrist—frigid press of the ultrasound eased, technician hunting
Errant remnants forgotten as I sink into our watery stare, tread there. Breathe. In go-to

Seminole tee and jeans, you sit, dimly lit in the distance, and I think, There is no
Other man for me. No words seemed necessary—the anchor of you across the hospital room
Meant we’d be okay, even with bough breached by another forever pain, that never-
Ending loss of our son, now doubled with a daughter. We didn’t know the flood had just
Begun, two loved fathers to follow. To keep afloat, we bottle up syllables, set corked pleas
Out to sea, adrift in glass; whispers trapped in seashells keep our secret aches, images of
Dreams where our babies breathe and your dad, that romantic, appears too late to
Yell us ashore—our tongues bitten, marriage drowned in a mouthful of blood.