My mom gave me $30 for a taxi as a plan B
in case you couldn't drive me home if we drank.
We drank and I stayed the night—
but I still used the $30 for plan B.

"You know what's just as addictive and twice as expensive as a line of coke?"
You slip out of my vision like a fallen credit card.
Your eyes touching my thigh and
your nose a smoke carton's width away from the coffee table
"Two lines of coke."

We were listening to California Love when your friend left my room at midnight
and you decided to stay longer and move onto the single bed of my dorm room.

I didn't ask for you and I to be alone in my room.
I didn't ask for bruises on my neck or a permanently locked door or a situation I never thought I'd end up in—
but somehow I ended up with them.

You want to be a model and it shows—
you wanted photos on your phone
of us making out before i kicked you out of my room
with a smile on my face because violence
is scarier when you could reciprocate it
(i know you're not above that).


you started crying because I am "so beautiful,"

taking off my shirt
"too beautiful to pass up."

"Like Barbie"

It took me twenty minutes to convince you to leave
with California Love playing again on my laptop.


California only loved you because they love ****** up try-hards who did too much coke once and dropped out of university.

I am the narcissist that
fell in love with my own
mind and sadly found out:
It's an abusive relationship.

I saw you in Tim Hortons for the first time in three years.
You told me I had grown and
I congratulated on you on your weight loss.


She is my best friend.
You didn't raise a child,
You raised an ironwork frame.
You threw a girl into reality before she could even spell the word.

And I would love to look at the other side, but I can't—
it always loops back around like that little girl
doing circles around on her ten-speed as she pulls up
to the convenience store to buy you cigarettes.

Hey, at least you called her an ambulance—
On Thanksgiving Day when she passed out
from lack of nutrition because you spent your last welfare check
on something I don't even want to hear your excuse for.

I remember my mother, coming into my room at eleven pm on a Wednesday, telling me to put some shoes on because you snapped a pool cue and placed it to a guy's neck.

My pajama pants ripped as I broke into your apartment to wake my best friend up and tell her that my mom was parked outside and she had to spend the night at my house.

You spent the night in the drunk tank hitting on officers.
She spent the night beside me crying and asking for any other mother but you.

We were in grade 6.

When she was 13, she had to live with me for 3 months because social services deemed you, "unstable."
When she was 14, she moved away to the city because she couldn't handle you anymore.

I went to visit her last weekend and she didn't say a single word about you.

I love you no more than I love
my credit card and left nostril.
Not a single gram more, but
not a single gram less, either.

I'm standing above you like a mechanical crane
you reach up your iron bars and I rotate away—
working on the next steel work frame of my life.
you are irreparable, and I am not strong
enough to carry
even the pieces of you.