Liz Chang

Why Am I Angry at My Favorite Folk Singer?

Summer 2022

She’s coming to the park near your house in July

and in January, days after your diagnosis,

you marked you were “interested.”

I had no idea you loved her—

or even liked her—

and I wanted to ask you about it,

to hold up my love next to yours,

watch the light pass through it,

quote song lyrics until our mouths

run dry or the beer runs out. But

a friend who lost her husband

to the same cancer cautioned me

try not to bring the world of the living

into the world of the dying,

so I held my love away from you.

They gave you two months in March

and when it came, it was almost to the day.

Now it is not yet early June and the bees

have begun filling their hive

with sweet, hard work and I hate her

for offering you what you can no longer have.

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Liz Chang was 2012 Montgomery County Poet Laureate in Pennsylvania. Her poems have appeared in Verse Daily, Rock & Sling, Origins Journal, Breakwater Review and Stoneboat Literary Journal, among others. Her chapbook Museum of Things is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.