My brother takes me bowling.
I'm upset again, another
exam, or a breakup or some other
stupid ****.
But he goads me-
You're just scared you'll lose
I beat him 67 to 25.
I did win, he grins later.
You're smiling.
.

He liked my smile but
not my laugh.
He liked my sarcasm
but hated my scars.
Between hello and we need to talk
I wanted the world and all he could give me were
three idiot words.

The traffic lights
blur your reflection in
a puddle on 6th street-
               You're stalling, saying something like
                                                The world is quiet here
             grocery stores and
                           train stations with
                                   names like liverpool, kingston
                       lundmouth, maurist

You broke my heart here years ago, Mari
saying all those pretty words.
       
I get by just fine without you these days. I make
tea for one,
           dress up for none,
I can walk every street in this ******* city
but this one.

                   Mari, it's just us now.
I'm all out of love.
I'm all out of everything.

                               There are no cameras rolling now darling,
                        
                                                                ­                   So just say it.

i met you when i was nineteen,
you like to tell different versions of this story:
we were in a parking lot, i found you at the subway, no, no it was during the last performance at a festival, we locked eyes and-
all i remembered were your shoelaces
how you laced the string through all the wrong holes
and the funny way how
we never look for
our vices till we're in
too deep.


"out there," i once said over the phone "must be a god for all the sad and willing *******-"


i was your favourite passenger when
you were drunk
at the steering wheel.
it was worth it for how
you always sped a little too fast
talked a little too loud
finally opened up that stubborn, lonely
heart.
the lane we're on doesn't have a name
look- how the lamplights
lurch forward;
up the alleyway, down the steps-
where are we going darling?
where are we going?



neither of us are doing okay.
you're running hard and fast and with those
loose laces,
i'm nineteen again and can't let go of
a bad thing, ****-
Hold my hand.
so it's sunlight. so it's suicide.
till the very end,
don't let go. don't let go.

Call a ***** a *****.
We're ******* in the double mattress with a city view of the skyline.
I'm sleeping with a man that only kisses me
when he's sorry.
Being okay doesn't necessarily mean you're fine,
but who's asking anyway?
Movies always make you think there's an end goal to everything
I'm just a breakfast in an eternal pilot episode.
There's a question he whispers to me
in the early hours, in Paris, in bed when he thinks I'm still fast asleep-
But you don't know what you're
asking for.

My heart clambered out of my chest years ago,
sick of all the ways
I beat it into the shapes I wanted.
I couldn't give it to you if I tried.

He doesn't say I love you, but i hear it all the same
between smudged weekends and the insufferable "what if's"
The reason we dress eachother up in pretty adjectives;
Love, we call her. Utilitarian goddess, I have no desire to be subdivided.
Halves. Quarters. Call me in the dark by someone else's name.


He kisses me on a friday evening at 6pm in an uptown restaurant, the way they do it in the movies. I wipe off the residue when he skims the menu. The speech is very long. The ring is very pretty. When I tell him no, you can see his world shatter. But there's always a ******* casualty isn't there? Him or you. Him or you.

You love me baby, I know
But that wasn't what I asked for.

In anatomy class our last experiment on motor neurons had two hearts joined in saline solution. They showed us how
if you shocked the vagus nerve of one with an electric probe,
                                                               the other heart beats too.
When I tell him this over the phone, he laughs,
Christ, that's morbid-
                                   I don't tell him I secretly find it romantic:
two hearts linked by physics, by nature, by law;
                                                      pumpin­g side by side
           when they're not even
                    in bodies anymore.