A perfume I saw in Lush the other day. The description reads: "Death & Decay. Let it transport you to a serene space where the fullness of beauty and its inevitable decay can be contemplated without fear."

The sun is hidden behind the clouds, and yet she still divulges her presence in subtle things-- the freckles on my sister's face, the flowers who strain their thin green necks towards the sky. I am sick of the sun and the summer, so I play Nina Simone and pretend it is autumn, swathing myself in sweaters and coats.

...

an excerpt:

"Today we are going to the funeral home. I am to read a poem at the service (thankfully, not one of my own) and so I powder my face, put on a pretty dress and try my best to conceal the blood-shot ellipse on my throat. The white powder makes the hickey feel more obvious than ever, like a ghost wearing a white sheet. I have never been good at make up. Online, it says to use a green concealer, and so I paint my throat with emerald eyeshadow, which is useless. It feels fucking absurd that I'm spending the hours before this funeral trying to cover up a hickey.

My throat paunches and contracts. The bloated, croaking vocal sac of a frog. Tiddalik."

...

another excerpt:

"I wore sneakers to my grandmother's funeral and I feel guilty about it."

...

Grief reconfigures the brain, re-informs memories, resets thought patterns and neural pathways. Grief is the chasm between is/was. Grief is painful unlearning/relearning. A brand new type of punctuation for everything you've ever written.

...

Poetry as a cemetery. A cemetery of faces, hands, gestures. A cemetery of clouds, colors of the sky, a graveyard of winds, branches, jasmine (the jasmine from Swidnik), the statue of a saint from Marseilles, a single poplar over the Black Sea, a graveyard of moments and hours, burnt offerings of words. Eternal rest be yours in words, eternal rest, eternal light of recollection.

—	Anna Kamienska (trans. Clare Cavanagh) in Industrious Amazement