Michael Dhyne
Memorial
We sat in a circle in the sand
and squeezed your pulse between us.
I closed my eyes. I saw sunlight
drawing the bloody folds of your blue uniform
like waves, the movement of bodies
calling away from themselves.
I felt wind gather itself the way time
accumulates, the airy silences
within each grieving cell. I thought
I was dreaming. I drew a circle in marker
over my heart. I cut a hole from a blue tarp
and stood perfectly still in its center.
I found myself in a body
of water, looking for an edge, instead
finding you everywhere.
Michael Dhyne reads “Memorial”
Michael Dhyne is the author of Afterlife, selected by Eduardo C. Corral for the 2023 Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry. His poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, Gulf Coast, and The Iowa Review, among others. His work has been supported by the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Community of Writers, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. He received his MFA from the University of Virginia and his MSW from the University of California, Berkeley. He lives in Oakland, California and works as a grief counselor for Stanford Medicine Children’s Health.