It felt sinful to cry
in front of you: my agony.
the woman I had
wronged. So many times,
in so many ways,
with so many words. They were false
truths I hadn’t meant to mean. Yet
somehow, along the way,

I had picked
them up and whisked them away
in my bag, your baggage and everything

else that had marred me.
A scratch
across the glass of my
actions: your face. I hope you can see
past the fog of my deviance. I’ll draw
a smile in the condensation, blurring the
cadence of an attitude—the pure
and their righteous, the demented
and their sin—to make a clearer picture
from this polaroid dangling, overexposed,
from the edges
of our friendship—the soft curve of a lie.

It tastes so smooth, rolling
up through my tongue. It sounds so bitter
wafting out from your throat.