Facebook Official Paula Persoleo
for C. E. It’s your birthday, and I scroll back through three years of comments to find you alive again: reading in a hospital bed after the final surgery; sporadic regularity for a month, then despair; poems, politics, unleashed dogs, deviled eggs; abandoned architecture, iambic tattoos, burned books; angels, Dickinson’s white dress, chemo’s first of five— hair growing longer as years lengthen. But there are three years of birthday posts (from the same person with saccharine font who finally was told “She’s dead”) that remind me how little I knew you. Yes, I watched the waxing cancer until it took your brain, mourned when your death was announced, posted a tribute with thanks for kind words about my undeserving poems. The difference between me and those who still wish you “the best Birthday week EVER! and... many many more!” is that I know you’re ashes.
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