I harbored you
quietly.

Like a shell plucked from the surf
and placed in the pocket of a winter jacket.
For months I'd run my thumb over your ridges,
and then I knew.

Love is no marching band.

It blooms in a slow creep;
a rose tint inside a scallop's
creamy heart.

The slight chill of a morning in summer.
Before the sun brags its potential.
It beams humbly with
the anticipation of a beginning.

But as does the heat of day,
loss stubbornly rushed in.
A shell slipping unseen through
some hole in a pocket's lining.

A shell lost in the sand at the North Sea.
You may fit to someone else's fingers,
but not in the same way you once fit me.

I haven't had my heart broken.
But I have thrown it against another person
and broke it myself.

He would've looked handsome in wedding photos,
but even more in a suit and tie
on the other side of the divorce court.

He would roll up his sleeves like a lawyer.
He would say things like:
You ruined my life when you got pregnant.

As if babies were something a woman conjured inside
herself out of lovesickness and desperation.
A snare in which to trap a man like him.

But instead I broke myself on him like surf on the ramparts.
I foamed and spat and washed myself right back
out to sea again.

And all I have is a notch on my map, marking
a shallow harbor,
a few torn sails
and an empty womb.

You were my life's great distraction,
from the tedious ins-and-outs of seasons,
the still summers and the silent snows.

From childhood's great terrors,
slipping under in the swimming pool,
from the restless rubbings of the twenties:

When my soul seemed too large
for my ribcage.

When I bottomed out in my thirties,
penniless, a slipped clutch in my car
and nothing but mustard in the refrigerator,
I remained for you.

I quit drinking when you threatened to
leave me on the kitchen floor.

That is the first bullet-point
on the endless ledger of debts
I owe to you.

And though we were fruitless
(genetically speaking)
your perfect DNA will remain in the soil's pores

and your calcium will marry the grass roots,

so that this great, dull planet
might become less ugly.

a great return, as I predicted,
like a king. With your crown, your laurels,
your broad shoulders and back,
your hands in your pockets, your face
hard-browed and blond as an SS guard.

he is a slave to his masculinity
he has you, he has had you
and still, you’re no necessity

Some sort of resurrection,
less like spring and more like remission.
A disease that I had chased like a rat
deep into my bones, now
creeps back to its hole in my chest.

you’ve seen his big artillery
bombs dropped, missiles flew
and still, you’re no necessity

Like an old rag dinging out of
a player piano. Off-key and tinny,
on an endless loop for the better part of a year.
I know the words to this song,
they go: he wants you not, he needs you not.

he owes you no apology
boys will be boys, it’s what they do.
he is a slave to his masculinity

But I have written him stories.
I have given him children,
a flat with tall windows and sunlight,
I have given us breakfasts and coffees,
funerals and weddings, I have given us.

he gave you one perfect memory
his pale skin in the pre-dawn blue,
but still, you were no necessity

I have taken them away.
Perhaps his room is white, cell-like,
empty walls. With a mattress on the floor,
for the king with his pride and
laurel wreath, no use for memories of me.

*Let me write you the last story
he had you once, and now he’s through
he is a slave to his masculinity
and girl, you’re no necessity

I met you when we both were in recovery, sitting in a waiting room,
while Dr. Limbo shuffled our papers and told us it'd be awhile.

You were in with a heart defect. It has a hole, you said,
that nothing so far can close up, and you're not getting any younger.

I suffered from chronic chills, the kind that make people cold to the touch,
hugs are like a trip to the morgue, I said, and you nodded thoughtfully.

We discussed the articles in every dogeared magazine they had laying out,
folding back the pages and pointing at the pictures.

You explained to me the inner-workings of the common espresso machine,
and I named all my favorite cathedrals in Europe, chronologically.

When we finished with that, we checked for the doctor, but he was busy.
You nursed the weak part of your chest as I ran my hands over my arms

You know, I think the hole is getting wider as I get older, and someday it'll eat
me away like cancer. As you speak, I see the slight depression near your sternum.

Well I fear that I'll never touch a living person, I'll only touch rocks.
And my capillaries will forget how to fill, and I'll freeze from the inside out.

We looked at each other, and I thought you might try to kiss me, but instead
you wonder if the doctor is a good one; and if they'll call our names soon;

and you turned to face the door.

If only the distance between our cities was enough,
but you still hang around the corners
just out of view.

I thought that putting the space of one country
between us would do,
so I rode a night train, crossed a border.

Your absence is in the language, I hear it in
the harsh Dutch syllables, they
remind me of you.

I need an ocean between us, but perhaps
even that won't salt-bleach
your shade from my skin.

If I was at the bottom of the Mariana Trench,
with 1,001 atmospheres of pressure pressing down
(1,000 parts water, 1 part  you)

It would not be enough.
If you were at the edge of the universe,
you would still be darkening my doorway.

If you died today
you would still be in my bed
come morning.

***** has got thinner hips.

Her thighs are clean lines
where mine are a ven diagram.

Collar bones, stomach, all negative spaces.
My figure is convex in all the wrong places.

Here's a bedtime story:
Once,
I got him drunk and he ****** me,
it was fruitless.
But he makes love to her.
He finishes with her,
while I had to push him off me.
But I digress,

he cups her face with the same
hands that he used
to push mine into his mattress.

But her and me,
we are still sisters
of the same anatomy.

So sister,
I hope you rip up his lungs
and drag him out to sea.