Imagining My Friend’s Widow, by Karen Paul Holmes

He called her his soul mate, 
and for the last two years 
they’d both known 
cancer would take him. 

Every minute 
together must’ve been a gift 
with a timebomb attached.  

I don’t know her, but I know 
a widow’s midnight keening 
and what her coming days bring. 

At first, the blessed distraction of details: 
telling people, signing forms, obit. 
Yet underneath: 
that new, shiny stone of pain.  

Body fragile as a slice of mica. 
Pecking at casseroles friends made. 
Then the jumbled, jigsaw stages of grief,  

sometimes even relief, 
mostly a blunt loneliness—
fan humming in the house, 
lawn sprinklers whispering. 

Believing, for a moment, that the song 
of gravel after dark 
is him pulling into the drive. 

–

Karen Paul Holmes won the 2023 Lascaux Poetry Prize and received a Special Mention in The 2024 Pushcart Prize Anthology. Her books are: No Such Thing as Distance (Terrapin, 2018) and Untying the Knot (Aldrich, 2014). Poetry credits include The Slowdown, Verse Daily, Diode, Glass, and Plume. Daughter of immigrants, she was the first generation to attend college and has an MA.

© 2025, Karen Paul Holmes