The Sister of my Oldest Friend Dies from Lung Cancer by Laurel S. Peterson

​I’m out walking and crying for my friend’s loss and about how hard it was for her to watch her sister slowly disappear, and how the last time I saw my friend, when we had dinner in New York with industrial chic tables and large glasses of wine, she said, we treat animals better than we treat the dying, and all I think about is death: when I wake up, when I fall asleep, when I’m working, and I know what she means and I cry for myself and for all the losses around me, and the people driving by must wonder what’s wrong with me, if they look up from their own problems—and why should they?—and I turn into Lakota Oaks, the conference center that’s going to be a school but used to be a monastery, and you can see the monks’ graveyard at the top of the hill from the long beautiful pond around which I now walk the remaining stations of the cross, an unbeliever amidst the incomprehensible universe, and I think: the universe is big enough to hold my grief without getting hurt itself. I don’t have to carry it all, and the man who was running the trail in the opposite direction passes me again, saying, beautiful day, and it almost is.

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Laurel S. Peterson is an English professor whose poetry has been published in many literary journals. She has two poetry chapbooks, That’s the Way the Music Sounds (Finishing Line) and Talking to the Mirror (Last Automat), and two full-length collections, Do You Expect Your Art to Answer? and Daughter of Sky (Futurecycle). She has also written two mystery novels, Shadow Notes and The Fallen (Woodhall). She is on the editorial board of Inkwell magazine, and the Norwalk Public Library Board, and served as Norwalk, Connecticut’s, Poet Laureate from April 2016 – April 2019.