ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Cleo Qian is a queer poet and fiction writer. She is the author of LET'S GO LET'S GO LET'S GO (Tin House, 2023). She has received fellowships from MacDowell Foundation, the University of Notre Dame, Casa Snowapple, and the Sundress Academy for the Arts. Her work has recently appeared in American Poetry Review, ZYZZYVA, The Sun, The Massachusetts Review, and other outlets.
Previously in Glass: A Journal of Poetry:
Dispatch from Hiroshima
November 19, 2025
Grief Theory
My friends tell me to stop thinking about it.
Are my friends, then, really my friends?
The wind knocks against the tape sealing shut the broken window,
and grief has made me an insane person (grief has made me insane).
You will never describe everything that happened to you —
not everything.
Each day we are living and testing our own theories on how to do it.
The bet: Our whole life. A hypothesis staked against the years we receive and take.
You will describe one thing over and over again:
over and over again, you will describe the wrong thing.
Poems sometimes tell the whole truth,
sometimes, whole lies.
A poem can end repeating the same fundamental mistake.
Too late, you’ll realize you were speaking in a dead language.
Too late, you’ll realize you were looking at the wrong mechanical face.
In the movies, which we watched endlessly,
everything was something that happened only to other people.
In intense grief, all your thoughts are about the subject of your grief. But there is only so much you can say aloud, and only for so long. Everyday life and social relations are not welcoming to someone repetitively and endlessly talking about loss; you are encouraged to "get over" it and "move on." I wrote this poem during an intense year of grieving, during which I put many of the thoughts I could not say aloud into poems, long after I had stopped talking about grief in my everyday life. It is partly also about the confusion and lack of coherence after a complicated loss, and how any narrative we come up with never feels wholly correct, or can make up for the mistakes we see in the past.
If you liked this, I highly recommend Raven Leilan's essay on grief.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published weekly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
