My Grief’s Favorite Hoodie / On the Eighth Day / The Things You Owe
by Venus Lockett
[object Object]
In this triptych of poems, grief is rendered as something intimate and invasive—tracing how love fractures into mourning and how survival demands both remembrance and refusal.
My Grief’s Favorite Hoodie
by Venus Lockett
My grief has a favorite hoodie.
It slouches at the wrists
and smells like late-night
Hennessy tears.
It wears me
more than I wear it;
a second skin stitched from
the remnants of who I was
before and who I became
after loss.
It tags along uninvited:
to brunches, midnight store runs,
and every appointment
I don’t wish to attend.
The hood draws in
when someone says my name;
it tightens when they reach for hugs,
adjusting and recoiling to protect its contents.
We’ve been together long enough
to constitute a union;
a passport between worlds
I never asked to travel.
I wash it every Sunday
and lay it on my altar to dry,
letting sunlight bleach
the memories away.
Some days it folds itself neatly
and naps in the drawer.
Other days, it stretches across my bed,
demanding time and devotion,
reminding me that mourning
is its own kind of geography.
Still, I love the scent;
cruel but familiar.
And on the coldest nights,
when even my heart goes numb,
it keeps me warm enough
to stop the shivering.
On the Eighth Day
by Venus Lockett
On the eighth day, He invented love.
On the ninth, heartbreak.
And here we are, 999 days later,
I haven’t slept a wink since.
I spent days Novocaining the pain
and nights searching for meaning.
I planted my worries on the moon
like a red flag.
I hurt in ways only the sun could burn away.
I drowned my sorrows in bourbon
and howled into the night like an
urban legend; the kind where
you die and come back to life;
the kind that proves
there’s life after death.
The Things You Owe
by Venus Lockett
The house was at a deficit:
down fifty containers of juice,
one hallway mirror, a working broom,
and countless bottles
of alkaline water.
Don’t forget the times
your love left marks.
When nothing worked outside,
you came home
and punched my clock.
Laughter used to fill these rooms.
Hope once healed these wounds.
And love—
love held our hearts like portraits
we thought we’d never move.
You stole my sense of security,
robbed me of my joy.
Of everything to snatched from me,
I miss my peace the most.
You owe me absence, you owe me space.
But most of all, you owe me the grace
of never returning to the scene of the crime.