“You spent two hours, telling me you’d never break my heart. You spent two hours, breaking my heart, just from wrapping it, so tightly, that it suffocated…”

Angry, and half in love with you, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.

I want to spend a lot but not all of my years with you. We’ll talk about kids                              but make plans to travel. I will remember your eyes                              as green when they were gray. Our dogs will be named For Now and Mostly.               Sex will be good but next door’s will sound better.There will be small things. I will pick up your damp towel from the bed,                                                            and then I won’t. I won’t be as hot as I was                               when I wasn’t yours and your hairline now so               untrustworthy. When we pull up alongside a cattle car                               and hear the frightened lows,                               I will silently judge you                               for not immediately renouncing meat. You will bring me wine                               and notice how much I drink.                                               The garden you plant and I plant                               is tunneled through by voles,                                                               the vowels                                                               we speak aren’t vows,                 but there’s something                               holding me here, for now,                 like your eyes, which I suppose                                                               are brown, after all.

“Can you fit my heart into yours? There’s a missing piece, several, actually, and I’ve begged them to come home, so we can be complete, but, God, they’re just like me. Off at parties they never wanted to attend, reliving rickshaw rides, and dances at bus stops, that are only wonderful in their heads. Hearts with heads, God, they’re just like me. I see you’re missing pieces too. You don’t have to tell me where they are, or where you’ve been, but, maybe we can ignore what we lost, and try to make a picture, from the pieces that remain?”

“My only vices are my smokes, my man, and his cruel commitments. Hell in November, it starts, I am forsaken, shaken, while he plays the good man, and I, the silent, sobbing partner. I weep, on her sheets, when he is hers, as a birthday gift, for her and her vows, broken, their shards sitting between my ribs. She is twenty again, for the ten minutes he lasts, before thinking of last night, when he was mine again. I’m in a tower of terror, trembling under tears, until he returns, through the smoke screens, and places smoke rings, on my faithful finger, that shine brighter, than the band of gold, she is still so proud of, despite it’s partner longing to be within me.”

“You read me like the books I write. Before I can invent excuses for the way I stare, the way I sigh, you’ve lit up the eyes, that make me weak. Your hands are across every word I’ve ever said, and I am speechless.”