Deborah Kohloss's poem is about losing people and discovering that language can't quite hold the loss. The title lists names, each preceded by "After," as if the poem comes in the wake of those people. The speaker begins by wondering who they are to her and whether she will keep feeling their absence once they are gone. She says plainly that she is sad, very sad, at their going.
Then the poem turns inward. The speaker struggles with nouns, the words we use to name people and things, and says what she has is not old or new ones but "no nouns," a kind of unknowing. She worries that saying "how sad I am" doesn't show what the sadness really is. Names come and go in her memory, and what remains is longing.
The mood is halting and raw. Broken lines, repetition and missing punctuation make it feel like someone thinking aloud, trying to grieve and name that grief at once.