Reconciliation shots,
Grey Goose and Ciroc,
pouring one by one in chipped glasses
on your microwave with the door locked.
Shabba remix on the stereo,
your cotton boxers and my lace underwear
contrasting in the ****** overhead light.
I pursed my lips after the first,
you slapped my *** and said
Don't be a *****! Take it!
without a chaser and without
hesitation you once again
pushed me fearlessly into fate
like all the times before,
when I'd wake up from a graphic nightmare
with resonating touch and hallucinations
from an LSD-like perspective
and you'd hold my head into the crescent
of your neck and tickle my spine
like an instrument
just long enough to calm me into sleep again.
Or when I didn't want to go to that party,
or I was afraid to give that presentation
or I lost all ambition due to past lost confidence.

You kicked the back of my knees so I'd fall
straight into uncertainty,
but that doesn't mean my fragility
has been numbed by your persona.
You're standing in your dress clothes,
but I'm the one fixing your tie.
You get an A+ on the paper,
but I'm the one telling you what to write.
You're the one upset,
but I'm the one who ends up hurt.

So we take our clothes off and apologize
for being whatever we were that day
with reconciliation shots,
cheap Grey Goose and ****** Ciroc.

I’ve found religion in your smile.
Trusted the way it curves, practicing
the lines in my mind with delicacy,
ripening your image until it’s sore.
Your throat baptizes me,
replaces the devil of my intentions
with sweet, rosy breath,
curling my inhibitions until they dive
back into me and I express my very desires
openly on a blanket--
and it’s no sin
because I love the way your spine stands
like a perfect cross, carrying me
to the vision you have of a better me
than what I used to be.
I’ve prayed for your thighs in naughty ways,
but you’ve taken my hands,
folded them into shapes I can’t comprehend
and kissed my fingertips until I was crying
out of confusion and catharsis,
finally understanding what it feels like to count
people, you, as a blessing.
I see God when you make instruments
out of blades of grass, or how that strap
slides off your shoulders when the wind
graces the moment with a whisper.
He gave me an angel disguised as a woman
with too many pillows on her bed and coffee breath,
but you pull me from point to point like taffy,
slowly, lagging, molding me into the gift
you never wished for. I, bestowed at His feet,
unwilling found a soul and a heartbeat
louder than any of my unforgiving words.

Sometimes it was as if she sipped chlorine
from little bottle caps with yellow nails,
tilting her skeletal neck back,
balancing it on a vertebrae that popped
through the top of her pastel blouse.
Really though, she ate media on sandwich bread;
believed anything in bold with twin quotations.
She was a hint of a woman, blue eyes. Translucent,
fair, a suggestion haunted by her own demons
that she dreampt about after I stayed up, waiting
for the sleeping pills to kick
in. After the baby came she obsessed
over her thickness, was confused and destroyed
as she called it by the miracle I laid in the crib
every night. Old photographs weren’t memories,
just reminders of how she used to look.
She would scream, explode with frustration,
when the baby wouldn’t stop crying, begged
Why doesn’t she like me? But it’s hard to hold
onto a ghost, sweetie. So she swore,
and she swore that tomorrow would be better,
she would get better. But I know
that once again I’ll make her a breakfast she’ll never eat,
rock the baby back to sleep,
and loop myself around another sunrise
just to feel warm again.