Fudging the Death Certificate

What does it signify to die of grief?
A friend once told me that he knew a doctor
who, when her hard-pressed team failed to unlock her
patient’s cause of death, scrawled on the brief,
“He died because his heart stopped, we believe.”
There’s no scenario you can concoct where
this statement does not technically hold water:
whether the luckless patient, on the eve
of his unraveling, suffered from a cancer
or from a bullet wound, his heart did stall.

This morning, on the subway, some straphanger,
shoving me, yelled, “I’m trying to get by!”
I wondered, “And who isn’t?” One and all,
we pass away with grief; through grief, we die.

JENNA LE

Jenna Le (jennalewriting.com) is the author of Six Rivers (NYQ Books, 2011) and A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora (Indolent Books, 2017), an Elgin Awards Second Place winner. Her poems appear in AGNI, Denver Quarterly, Los Angeles Review, Massachusetts Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Pleiades, Poet Lore, Verse Daily, and West Branch.