Still Here

Some losses do not have funerals.

The friendship that ended in silence instead of a fight. The body you used to live inside. The recipe no one wrote down. The group chat that just went quiet one March. The version of yourself you can see in old photographs and barely recognize. The country you thought you lived in. The future someone handed you that turned out not to arrive.

This is a book of poems for the grief no one taught you how to name. One hundred and ninety-six free verse poems about living loss, the kind of loss that keeps walking around in the world without you, that doesn't pause your job or excuse you from dinner, that asks for mourning and is given, instead, a Tuesday.

Written in a voice that is quiet, specific, and disarmingly honest, these poems sit beside the reader in the long aftermath. They name the small things first: the deleted voicemail, the cold side of the bed warming up, the kitchen corner where the homework used to happen. Then they widen, gently, into the larger losses underneath. A faith left behind. A child grown up. A language half-kept. A self that was always going to become someone else.

If you have lost something you cannot quite explain, these poems will sound like someone has been there with you the whole time. Open this book on the page that finds you. Let it be what it is. Let it be enough.

Greg Johle lives in North Carolina with his wife and five children. He enjoys Mexican food, and shooting at things. He earned his bachelor of science from Azusa Pacific University and an MBA from the University of Phoenix. His real job is software development.