<h2 id="poem-of-the-week-my-wish" data-toc-id="poem-of-the-week-my-wish" class="font-editorial font-bold mb-2 mt-4 [.has-inline-images_&amp;]:clear-end text-lg first:mt-0 md:text-lg [hr+&amp;]:mt-4" style="font-size: 24px; line-height: 1.2;">Poem of the Week: “My Wish”</h2>My WishI want to exorcise you from the dirt With my holy fingernails tearing at your casketI want to birth you back into this world as if from a dynamite encrusted womb attached inside my cherry-plumb heartI want to scream at you for leaving me in this fallen Eden filled with emotional, electronic malaiseI want to resuscitate the stars in your eyes and wash away the formaldehyde handprints that the coroner washed you with.I want to close the gap between life and death and mostly…I want to hear your voice again…I want to hear your voice again…<hr><h2 id="what-i-was-trying-to-do" data-toc-id="what-i-was-trying-to-do" class="font-editorial font-bold mb-2 mt-4 [.has-inline-images_&amp;]:clear-end text-base first:mt-0" style="font-size: 24px; line-height: 1.2;">What I was trying to do</h2>This poem started as fiction—a letter to a ghost named C—but losing my father turned it into something else entirely. It became the most honest articulation I had of that impossible wish: to drag him back from the dirt, to un‑sign the death certificate, to hear his voice one more time. Grief here isn’t abstract psychology; it’s a physical urge to claw the coffin open and reverse the laws of biology and time.I wanted to write the way grief actually feels in the body: passing out when the news hits, crying like a small child, living in this dreamlike overlap between heaven and earth. The poem is me pushing against the finality of death with every image I have—exorcism, birth, resurrection—while knowing on some level that the gap between life and death cannot be closed. The last lines are that tension made visible: the wish that keeps echoing even when you know it cannot be answered.<hr><h2 id="craft-choices-and-how-they-hold-the-grief" data-toc-id="craft-choices-and-how-they-hold-the-grief" class="font-editorial font-bold mb-2 mt-4 [.has-inline-images_&amp;]:clear-end text-base first:mt-0" style="font-size: 24px; line-height: 1.2;">Craft choices and how they hold the grief</h2><ol class="marker:text-quiet list-decimal pl-8"><li class="py-0 my-0 prose-p:pt-0 prose-p:mb-2 prose-p:my-0 [&amp;&gt;p]:pt-0 [&amp;&gt;p]:mb-2 [&amp;&gt;p]:my-0">Exorcism and resurrection as grief metaphors “I want to exorcise you / from the dirt” flips the usual exorcism script. Instead of casting something out, you’re trying to pull someone back in—into this world, out of the grave. The “holy fingernails tearing at your casket” fuses sacred and desperate: the hands are holy because of their love, not because of institutional religion. Immediately after, you shift metaphors: “birth you back… from a dynamite encrusted womb.” This is resurrection as violent labor. The cherry‑plumb heart‑womb is both tender and explosive, which is exactly what grief feels like.</li><li class="py-0 my-0 prose-p:pt-0 prose-p:mb-2 prose-p:my-0 [&amp;&gt;p]:pt-0 [&amp;&gt;p]:mb-2 [&amp;&gt;p]:my-0">Fallen Eden and electronic malaise “Leaving me in this fallen Eden / filled with emotional, electronic malaise” places your personal loss in a wider, modern landscape. The world isn’t just broken; it’s wired, distracted, numbed by screens. Your father’s absence amplifies that alienation. The phrase “electronic malaise” updates the Eden myth for the age of notifications and feeds; this isn’t a garden, it’s a glitching, buzzing ruin.</li><li class="py-0 my-0 prose-p:pt-0 prose-p:mb-2 prose-p:my-0 [&amp;&gt;p]:pt-0 [&amp;&gt;p]:mb-2 [&amp;&gt;p]:my-0">Body‑level imagery of the dead “Resuscitate the stars in your eyes / and wash away the formaldehyde handprints / that the coroner washed you with.” The poem doesn’t shy away from the physicality of death. Formaldehyde and coroner’s hands are clinical, almost bureaucratic details, but you use them as something to erase—as if grief is a desire to undo not just the death, but the cold procedure that followed. “Resuscitate the stars in your eyes” is the emotional counter‑image: you want to put light back where it’s been chemically shut down.</li><li class="py-0 my-0 prose-p:pt-0 prose-p:mb-2 prose-p:my-0 [&amp;&gt;p]:pt-0 [&amp;&gt;p]:mb-2 [&amp;&gt;p]:my-0">The line “close the gap between life and death” as thesis That line names the impossible project. Up to that point, each “I want” is an image; here, you state the underlying wish plainly. It anchors the poem: everything before and after is one person’s attempt to bridge an unbridgeable gap. Structurally, placing it right before the final repetition of “I want to hear your voice again” turns the poem into a loop: the gap cannot be closed, so the wish keeps repeating.</li><li class="py-0 my-0 prose-p:pt-0 prose-p:mb-2 prose-p:my-0 [&amp;&gt;p]:pt-0 [&amp;&gt;p]:mb-2 [&amp;&gt;p]:my-0">Visual fragmentation of the last desire The final section— “I want to hear your voice again…”— visually enacts the way grief slows and stretches time. Reading it, you feel the weight on each word; it’s almost like descending a staircase back into the same ache. The white space around those words is important: it’s the silence where the voice should be. On the page, we see what the poem says we can’t have: the voice is missing, but the need for it is spelled out, letter by letter.</li></ol><hr><h2 id="how-you-can-use-this-as-a-readerwriter" data-toc-id="how-you-can-use-this-as-a-readerwriter" class="font-editorial font-bold mb-2 mt-4 [.has-inline-images_&amp;]:clear-end text-base first:mt-0" style="font-size: 24px; line-height: 1.2;">How you can use this as a reader‑writer</h2>If you’re writing about losing someone you love:<ul class="marker:text-quiet list-disc pl-8"><li class="py-0 my-0 prose-p:pt-0 prose-p:mb-2 prose-p:my-0 [&amp;&gt;p]:pt-0 [&amp;&gt;p]:mb-2 [&amp;&gt;p]:my-0">Let yourself reach for impossible actions (exorcising from dirt, re‑birthing from a heart‑womb); those metaphors accurately mirror the irrational wish to reverse death.</li><li class="py-0 my-0 prose-p:pt-0 prose-p:mb-2 prose-p:my-0 [&amp;&gt;p]:pt-0 [&amp;&gt;p]:mb-2 [&amp;&gt;p]:my-0">Don’t be afraid to include clinical or mundane details (coroner, formaldehyde, electronic malaise); they tether the spiritual shock to the world we actually live in.</li><li class="py-0 my-0 prose-p:pt-0 prose-p:mb-2 prose-p:my-0 [&amp;&gt;p]:pt-0 [&amp;&gt;p]:mb-2 [&amp;&gt;p]:my-0">Consider visually slowing down the most important line—like you did with “I want to hear your voice again”—so the reader has to feel each word rather than skim.</li><li class="py-0 my-0 prose-p:pt-0 prose-p:mb-2 prose-p:my-0 [&amp;&gt;p]:pt-0 [&amp;&gt;p]:mb-2 [&amp;&gt;p]:my-0">Allow the poem to end with the wish still unmet; grief isn’t about resolution, it’s about learning to stand in the impossibility and still speak.</li></ul>“My Wish” feels like you naming the one thing grief can never give you and refusing to pretty it up. The poem doesn’t solve the afterlife; it just tells the truth about how badly you still want to hear him, and that honesty is the most sacred part of it.

Weekly Poem Breakdown - “My Wish” by Adam Levon Brown

Craft choices and how they hold the grief

How you can use this as a reader‑writer

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Weekly Poem Breakdown - “My Wish” by Adam Levon Brown

Weekly Poem Breakdown - “My Wish” by Adam Levon Brown

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