Dear Lily, I scrawled on some cheap floral stationery
Doesn’t it scare you? How mom never learned
that you take your tea with milk, and every year
you opened Christmas gifts to find red wine
when you preferred whiskey? I saw your eyes,
they glimmered with hope that things would be different,
only to be overtaken by dusk and light sighs.

“Expectation is the root of all heartache,” dad says,
grizzly hands on our shoulders. Rewind to your
14th birthday that he spent on the phone, calling
Paris and India and everywhere but home, all for
us to have “everything we need”. But our teeth are
chewing, mashing up plants for fuel. Do you ever
feel like a strawberry? Ripe for the picking, bright and
bold, only to be mashed up and spread like jam on
toast? Because I do, Lily, and I hope that you were
the topping on wedding cake, because **** I was bruised.

Chewed up and spit out by a child — he didn’t know better.
“Yucky! That’s icky!” his mother cried wide-eyed (she saw
my dark spots). And now here I am, sipping your
old whiskey and hoping it will heal the bad spots deep
inside. Patch up my holes so that in eight years
when I’m good as new, I’ll throw my head back and laugh
and tell my kids I’m a refurbished version of you.