Resting at Your Grave, I Remember When You Said, “I Love You, Wittmeyer” by Cathy Wittmeyer

Rain pricked my face through the screen door & I knew it dripped down the back of your T-shirt. A neighborhood dog crooned. Still, I pushed you into that dark wet after our ritual hug against the peeling doorframe & then those words next to my last name. I pushed you out, turned on the outside light, & said go home instead of I love you, too. It wouldn’t be right to believe a whiskeyed tongue. The beagle kept howling—the heckler. To take your keys & put you up on my sofa for a night didn’t seem safe after those words—afraid to throw friendship at fire. I pushed you out on slick stones in shiny grass. My family name was a prayer on your raspberry-stem lips. I felt whole when you said it. I never told you that. You were the first I told I was engaged. You came to our wedding. Years later, I still hadn’t told you when you died in a car wreck on a different rainy night. Had someone else pushed you out in the slippery dark? Did a hound howl a warning before you said you loved her, [last name]?

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Cathy Wittmeyer is a poet from Buffalo, NY. She works in Dornbirn, Austria. Her poem “Possession” received an honorable mention in the 2018 Lauren K. Alleyne Difficult Fruit Poetry Prize. She earned her MFA in poetry from Carlow University in 2020. Her chapbook, knotted, was a finalist for the 2020 Broken River Prize. Her work has appeared in The Tiny Journal, Tangled Locks Journal, and Book of Matches among others. See more at: https://cathywittmeyer.com