This poem appears in my book Survival Tips For the Pending Apocalypse (2019, Spartan Press).

Poem for Sara Romweber

You should have poems written for you
full of drum fills and cymbal crashes, poems
to your wild hair, to your fierce kindness.
You should have been able to read those poems
in a book, in Rolling Stone,
on the backs of record covers
in the cool stores where your friends worked.

I’m digging through old albums today,
blowing dust off so they will play
on one of these turntables still hooked up
to half decent speakers and a working receiver,

and it’s been two days since you died
and in listening I hear thunder and chaos
from your kit but you were always in time.
Even your cancer had the word blast in it
but there are no poems here.

I only have this story and I tell it all the time:
Your band, Snatches of Pink,
opened for Jason and the Scorchers
at the Cat’s Cradle in Carboro. After your set,
you wandered into the crowd and I couldn’t
resist the chance to tell you how great you sounded,
how you played your drums like a shaped explosive charge,
how your rhythms are the soundtrack of my life

and you thanked me and hugged me
with your whole face smiling like I was an old friend.
All I could do was blather on about who knows what
because Rock Star hugs are such rare and disarming things.

It’s been two days and all I can do
is write this poem
when it’s too damned late
and hope that somebody, sometime,
wrote you a poem, too, and that you held
it in your strong, tiny hands.
I hope it made you smile.