i love this girl
but i used to love this other girl
and i used to think
i always would

but i don't

and it's an ugly thing
to not love someone anymore
so i won't love this girl
and it's still

an ugly thing

Alone
In black park of bed
-Elise Nada Cowen


Bedding them, saving them -
(or maybe the reverse?)
it was all the same to me.

All of them, like that;
One liked to wrestle first,
another wanted to be tied down.

Their eyes loosed in the darkness,
swimming at me, sparking
& begging, always begging.

But all of our skins need touching,
all of our faces want remembering.
So I gave them what they needed:

I loved them all with unclouded heart.
Ivy trellises inside me,
but memory is still sterling.

Black park of bed -
yellow crush dawn -
I am the giving snare.

in each shattered fragment
of time
we are forced apart

there is nothing of me
that does not cry out
for everything of you

There is something coming
out of the summer fog.

It abrades the full bellies
of ill clouds which burst

into sloughing rain slices
that slush and slide in soft slips

& slurs as it slouches
through the soak and sinks

sodden and silent and spent
to the wet-stunned cement stub.

Then, a pause - and it is already gone:
a visitation from an unwanted memory.

Shadows rise and suddenly fall
from slick brick gibbets:

cars throw stray starry bars
of slim dim shine from their teeth.

A palace of broken fog
escapes into the east,

leaving a black tabletop stain
fading slowly on the brain.