Take your grief to water. To a stream cold and honest.
Sit amidst the last of the purple fleabane
and the corpseberries that predict the color of winter.
Let yourself go slack, like the water that softens to ribbon
around rocks. They have seen and heard every grief
of this earth. Your sorrow is no smaller
and no larger than any they hold. It is yours.
Your sorrow is a warm familiar who beds down
in your chest, flattening the tall grasses into a wallow
that’ll hold her. Offer your sorrow familiar the water
of this stream. Let her taste it, anoint her lips and tongue,
roll it over the coals that line her throat and stoke
her voice to howl. Let your familiar cup her paws
and wash refreshment over the trouble lines
of her face. Offer your sorrow’s tears to the stream.
Let the current take them. Let tears become river,
become confluence, become outlet and ocean.
They will fall again as rain.
Erin O’Regan White
Erin O’Regan White is a writer and printmaker from Missoula, Montana. Her writing appears in Deep Wild Journal, amongst others, has received Pushcart Prize and Best American Essays nominations, and won the 2024 Merriam-Frontier Award. She holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Montana and was editor-in-chief of CutBank.