She said she got out of bed with me
feeling halved, as if something was removed

during the night. She called us the zeroes
in the hundred, with the world our one:

we got kicked from bar after bar
when she blew up at me, threw pints

& chairs, and then later we'd make up in bed
until we were both crying from the toll.

Friends would pull us each aside
& whisper warnings, ask if we were sure

this was what we wanted (of course not,
but in for a penny in for a pound).

In NYC at the old pine bar on my birthday
she got so drunk she fell from the bar stool

& sobbed on the floor that no one loved her:
"You should save her, even if you can't

save yourself," said the old devil
conjured when I was 4, still there at 29;

I listened as it made secret promises of love
in exchange for burnt offerings, broken meat.

I remember the slip of her hand in mine
while she stepped around a tarnished

subway grating for fear she'd fall through
& be lost to the stone: "That's it," she said,

"that's my worst nightmare down there -
to be all alone, hurt, crying out from a well,

crying from the dark, the wet dark,
to be in a place where no one gets rescued."