To My Dead Ex
if it was suicide
you’re forgiven
if you just wanted those low-down, slow-down pills to soothe
away your memories of force
and what you did with it—
where your hands went, where they slipped
other pills in—
if you just wanted to forget that you could never only be
that little girl’s good daddy
then there’s no mercy here
except she won’t remember you
Elizabeth Kate Switaj's first poetry collection, Magdalene & the Mermaids, was published in 2009 by Paper Kite Press. She has also published a chapbook, The Broken Sanctuary: Nature Poems, with Ypolita Press. Recent poems have appeared in Folio and Hawai'i Pacific Review.She is currently the Assistant Managing Editor of Irish Pages: A Journal of Contemporary Writing and a Contributing Editor to Poets’ Quarterly. She recently completed a Ph.D. in English at Queen's University Belfast with a dissertation on James Joyce as an EFL teacher.
