One Poem by Allison Jensen

 

The Shape That Never Returns

You were here once; your brief, unguarded flame

Burned bright enough to score the dark with heat.

Though time erases every fragile claim

Where face and gesture once refused retreat,

Memory cannot restore you to the same,

It loosens form, releases breath and feet.

I lose the shape, the future without name—

Yet grief remains, exacting, incomplete.

It walks beside me, silent, unappeased,

Returns when rooms grow still, when voices cease.

No plea disarms it; no endurance frees.

If love were less, then suffering might cease.

But grief holds fast to what it once had seized—

For love outlives the body it must lose

Allison Jensen is a California-based writer. Her work explores power, identity, grief, and the quiet ways people are shaped by the systems around them.