Whelm

These days sleep covers me like an overturned pot placed by some guardian-angel-would-be-horticulturalist assigned to protect first-leafed seedling widowers from insomnia’s frostbite—these lowering heart-freeze nights that no weatherman ever had the mind to warn me would mark this long season of her unmitigated absence.

Ullage

Invariably I awaken after a quartet of hours, each hour seeming to add another voice, building to this chorus of sorrow that brings me, buoyed up by my brain’s ferment, back into the world, this small space where I exist between the wine of sleep and the musty, long cork of consciousness.

Widow-UR

Under my flesh the stark yearnings of the soul grow fraught. Grief is a blind placeholder for the absent wife my taut strained memory strives constantly to resurrect.

Author’s Notes:

Whelm: “Started as a medieval English sea term meaning to capsize. In 1842 the Florist’s Journal wrote that Pansies that were planted out in the autumn should be protected by whelming a small pot over each plant” (source: Oxford English Dictionary).

Ullage: The unfilled space in a barrel or wine bottle.

UR: In psychology, an unconditioned response (UR) is the naturally occurring response that follows an unconditioned stimulus (US).

Bio: Roy J. Beckemeyer