Grieve in a Tea Towel

My grandmother grieved like a woman who had already lost too much.

She folded sorrow into clean tea towels,
hung it on the line beside my grandfather's shirts,

as if the wind might soften it.

She never spoke of everything.

Only enough
to keep the ghosts fed.

There were names
that disappeared from conversation,
photographs turned face down,
silences that arrived
before anyone entered the room.

She carried loss
the way some women carried handbags — always within reach,
never really put down.

I thought grief belonged to funerals.

She taught me
it could live in the way
someone buttered bread,
looked out a window,
or flinched
every time the phone rang.