Afterwards
He closed the door.
January bit through the walls.
The bed kept the warmth
seventeen minutes, then none.
No witness but the sheets.
I thought I stayed.
I inventoried the fridge.
The cream had turned.
I was late to the news of myself.
I didn’t starve.
I just never came back to the table.
Even hunger
has standards.
I left later,
quiet enough that air forgot me.
I went the way women go
who survive too long.
Afterward
I moved through rooms without arriving.
I lived like a light you forget to turn off.
The cream soured.
And I was elsewhere
long before I knew it
Copyright © 2026 by Eva Candelaria Sosa. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 12, 2026, by the Academy of American Poets.
“‘Afterwards’ is a poem about aftermath as a domestic condition. I wanted to write into the quiet, ordinary evidence that remains after abandonment: sheets, spoiled cream, a table no one returns to. The poem considers how the self can lag behind experience, continuing to move through rooms before it realizes it has already left some part of itself behind. Its grief is deliberately restrained. I was interested in the plainness of survival, and in how absence can become almost architectural.”
—Eva Candelaria Sosa
Eva Candelaria Sosa
