"Grief Observatory" by Topaz Winters
Grief Observatory
after Taylor Swift A year of trying to love you neatly & I’m still scrubbing stains off of the stove. White sugar coagulating in the kitchen sink, purple shadows beneath the pigeons on the windowsill. You tell me you’ve never seen the northern lights, but with all that talk you have to believe they’re beautiful. I tell you I thought I knew what grief was & then my friends started dying in front of me. So 300 missed calls from my father & finally I picked up the phone. So the lipstick quivered in the dresser drawer after every use, begging once again to be touched. I move with the ease of a woman only playing woman. I bleed through the bedsheets. I vacuum baking soda from the mattress. My cutting board & I build a life together out of garlic & dish soap. On the walk to work I pass the crowd of people who go to the lake to be alone, & I begin to understand. Pot holder flung on the counter, single egg yolk in a coffee mug, freezer growing rust, full of wilted roses & whiskey sours. Your touch on my lower back squeezing through to the hallway, careless & crucial, & this is my skin because you touched it. The last time, four months off of medication in the city I swore would save me, I screamed at you in the kitchen WE CAN’T KEEP DOING THIS IF WE KEEP DOING THIS WHEN IS IT OVER WHEN IS IT GOING TO STOP & you put out your hands to calm the caged animal of my body & said Tomorrow. My dead friends cook me dinner & I wake up with burns across my palms in the shape of Iceland. I’ve never seen the lake they chose over my love, but with all that talk I have to believe it’s beautiful. Originally published in Invisible Strings: 113 Poets Respond to the Songs of Taylor Swift (Balanchine Books, 2024)
Audio: Topaz Winters reads “Grief Observatory”
Topaz Winters is the Singaporean-American author of So, Stranger (Button Poetry 2022), which won the Button Poetry Short Form Contest & was a 2025 Sealey Challenge Pick & LitBowl Best Poetry Book of 2022. Her debut poetry collection, Portrait of My Body as a Crime I’m Still Committing (Button Poetry 2019 & 2024), was a finalist in the Broken River & Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prizes. Topaz’s poetry, fiction & nonfiction are published in The Drift, Waxwing, Passages North, Pithead Chapel, Foglifter, & others. Her work has received support from the Studios at MASS MoCA, the Sundress Academy for the Arts, & the National YoungArts Foundation. She serves as the editor-in-chief at Half Mystic Press & lives between New York & Singapore.