A Consolation Prize

A Consolation Prize appeared in the December 2025 issue of The Poetry Lighthouse.

It was Rachel who said, I love Emily Post. She asked me to tell her
when the big white book filled with intricate orders of service
arrived at the bookshop. You read Emily Post? I asked her, waiting

for some ironic response  (for Rachel was the coolest of the cool
in those days and I was a little in awe of her). But she was serious:
I love the big white book, she said, her dark eyes filled with wonder.

Where else can you go and it says it has all the answers?

I lost Rachel later in the flotsam of those years that were unkind
to so many of us: but later I was in a bookshop myself, my hand
lingering on that thick white spine. It was heavy, weighty

with wisdom that proclaimed it had an answer to everything,
and now I think I know what Rachel was talking about.
We all need limits, and you have to know the rules before

you break them: but the night of her suicide I understood
that nobody has all the solutions, not little lost Rachel,
not even Emily Post, and what the book gives you at best

is a consolation prize:

something to cling to
when you still believe that somewhere
there might yet be answers.