I count the number of women you’ve slept with
by how much lint I can pick from your shirt. Girls who staged
a camisado: by evening, a washing machine’s dream –
supposed to be in slumber but you come out
needing cleaned. I love you the way a mother does
her son, even after he has said, “I hate you,” ninety times.
If I cannot remove you from them,
at least their particles stay unattached to you and
I am a bobby pin broken in half because it tried to open a lock
sewed closed with a special heart-glue; other
girls are newspaper articles read with coffee at dawn
you forget until the story’s repeated on a nightly broadcast.
God, you look like opal when you come home –
curly-cue dents on the back of your knees,
the kind of handwriting only made by fingernails or teeth.
I wonder if it is because no one can find your birthmarks but me
if a woman can be self-righteous enough to want
to inscribe her own, and so, you have just become a gem
littered all over with worthless pearls.
Invisible, I am invisible. I can want you, but it cannot be seen
how your love is intangible and cannot be felt.
What he sees is so important that he does not realize
just as much is too bright for his eyes –
when I believed our breath was a single, everlasting force
and why would choruses sing a staccato song
is the same question as, why would I continue to flirt with you
knowing that every day I crawl further outside our
three-year bubble into something more like
a bunker. I sweep the floors behind every midnight attack.