What’s Lost

Katherine Schneider

Sometimes all I see is what’s lost.

I face backwards,
floating out to sea
on the ebbing ache of tragedies,

holding my collection
of fossilized dreams,
once indefatigable, 

now extinct. 

First there are smaller sighs:

stilled anticipation,
hopes wasted on wind,
the diminishment 
of acts magnified

by a quixotic imagination.

And then what I
can hardly bear to think—

your friendly face
has gone to the grave,
I can eat up my memories

but taste nothing sweet.

I’ll get over it, I say,
but I’m not the same,
especially in 
such moods as this,

when voids are the only things
I can name.

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Katherine Schneider is an adult ESL professor and poet, as well as a co-founder and co-host of the literary livestream FUMFA Poets & Writers Live. In addition to her writing and teaching work, she is a mentor with We Are Not Numbers, a project helping young Palestinian writers to tell their stories and publish them in English. Her first book of poetry, I Used to Remember the Story of How, was published by Finishing Line Press in November 2019. Her poems have appeared in Ruminate, Blue Line, The Poetry Porch, and The Paddock Review, and her poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She has collaborated with musician/producer Dave Robertson to record and release several poem songs under the name The Story of How. Her poem “What’s Lost” is about grief for losses both seemingly small and overwhelmingly large, and how that landscape of grief can hold the mind and heart captive.