the best kind of love my head tells me is the kind that doesn’t leave anything behind,
because things that last have the power to linger and break and mutate and ache

but if
you ride on a feeling that only lasts the night
it will be intense and extreme and unforgiving and wonderful and even
belief in the right to take something more does not exist and all it leaves is

a final indelible wistfulness

once a month estrogen teaches girls the
meaning of happiness
by feeding them to the darkness of their own imagination.
once a month i see my incompleteness manifesting as physical imperfection
staring
staring me down at my ugly claw feet my jiggly thighs my soft stomach my mammoth arms my swollen eyes my misshapen eyebrows my thinning hair
even my fingernails,
the shape of my fingers all wrong

we can’t get out of bed. there hasn’t been
one time where you saw the light before i did -
maybe once, when you
swore to make me eggs for breakfast, scrambled
with just a little bit of milk.
i taste your morning breath but when you kiss me
it’s always Colgate. i like your morning breath
more than any brand of toothpaste
it tastes like you
not some pharmaceutical company ******.

who still remembers the beginning anyway
my cries flooding the clinical tiles
maybe my mother held me like a
gemstone towards the new sun, but
who still remembers the beginning anyway

the eggs run different the second time you make them
you laugh, same crusty eyes, same fading patience as we cross 12 noon:
no one stays the same,
not even eggs

some days are gold and silver.
some days i tumble out of bed with yesterday’s bad hair
and you wake up late,
and the eggs are different,
and i taste your morning breath, but

when i stagger home onto the couch and hurl my dress across the room and
can’t turn on the tv when i’m starfish face down on the floor
you are always
weary,
ready
to hand the remote to me.

the comparison doesn’t **** me. i could look at their thin arms or beautiful hair and still
somehow find my place. it’s the irony, the postmonition – the
afterthought, like they are now,
like i may, will become.
i tell you it’s awkward. mostly i just
can’t look them in the eye, like i am indebted to them,
infinitely,

forever the backformation that reduces them to footnotes. i know their stories;
the ones intertwined with yours, once upon a time hinging on your
exhalations, existing only
within the confines of your frighteningly tidy room
and between your muscular thighs.

i know them because they are now mine.

we may never have Paris, but we’ll always
have the sweaty early spring,
the tiny super single by the window, all-night

radio seeping through your speakers as we
drift in and out of sleep.

Perhaps the worst part about happy starts is the constant
knowledge at the back of your head
that this too wouldn’t end happy
you’re probably even rooting for it to tear
there’s no way out
of a cycle like this

See,
we are all willing victims because the start is too addictive, too beautiful, too much
like magic
that we are willing to endure the tears
and the holes in our chests