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How a Month Becomes a Tidal Force

Jill Michelle 

February floods like broken water in our bed—rafts of sad blood between us for so long, we do not notice. It surges like a father’s dream of holding a grandchild washed downstream. It overruns like the plaques in the other dad’s head, missives slipping into riptide, personality pulled to sea. It overflows with breakthrough memories, iceberg tips sharp as my own clipped voice still willing the impossible, asking the nurse one last time, Is he breathing? It engulfs. Each winter now, a tidal pool of grief, pulling at the jagged shorelines of me. It floods like a namesake plain, like a namesake, but still, there is no thawing me.

Jill Michelle's latest poems appear/are forthcoming in Atlas and Alice,
BoomerLitMag, Drunk Monkeys, Tipton Poetry Journal,
 and Valley
Voices
. She teaches at Valencia College in Orlando, Florida. 

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