We sat blowing shapes in the smoke and twirling insubstantial rings around our fingers like wedding vows I do, I do, until the end of this cigarette Til ash do us part, my flame-ridden bride, my raspybreathed king---still
and quiet in the little cruelties stacked between us wooden-faced as Russian dolls growing smaller and meaner in cold smoke curled round shoulders space between shivers contrary wispcat, blueblack cracks in the universe and veins of a wrist
black to blue rubber to glue you’ll always keep chasing me away and I, like a rubber band, snap back because I’m
sorry I spilled cereal on the floor and crunched it up with bare feet cracked the martini glass into so many pieces it didn’t look like danger but hard raindrops on scuffed tile
sorry redwhiteblue America strobes are scary, you’re not in the club it was dark and you wanted to go home---you still want to go home---but without the blue-uniformed stranger or the guy who bruised his fingerprints on your waist
sorry for wearing dreams of romance like perfume on pressure points, curling my tongue around pain pills with wishes that can't put out thunderstorms and mend the gaps in a sidewalk
sorry (and this was back when i cried for a bandaid, any at all, for surface cuts) we wanted to look for truths in picture books and lies in the law because life is so much better as a cartoon with our speech planned in bubbles
sorry that when we were little I thought rivers were small because the blue veins mapping your wrist were water to me then I let you fall into, y’know, that real emotional condition where life was written in rules chubby fingers & a Bic stick pen
sorry I didn’t leave a post-it just a crumpled up coat and the smell of smoke when my footsteps burned a river blazing outside and away.