I’m ******* freezing.
I’ve been sitting here across from a parking lot
in a little patch of green, and the sprinklers
keep going on and off, but I sit here—
watch the droplets slide down my black leather boots,
shifting my legs in my soaked denim shorts,
picking at the soggy bread of my dollar menu sandwich.
I didn’t win the peel off sticker contest on the wrapping,
and I also missed the trashcan when I threw it out,
like you threw me out

and it’s not like I saw it coming. Considering our cat
is still at the vet and we just found a new couch,
but I guess my bag of clothes and one pair of clean underwear
are my only companions now as I wait
for some sort of direction or weird, metaphor
to slink down from the Maybelline billboard,
crawl up my skin and into my mind so I’m not just
sitting here, freezing.

But I guess it’s not as cold as that one time
you slid half a Klondike bar down my back
as I sat circling help-wanted ads in the paper.
I screamed, but you covered my mouth and kissed
the space behind my ears a million little time.
I licked your hand and you wiped it on my shoulder,
turning

back to the stove to stir the Campbell’s soup we found
behind the expired olives in the cupboard. Yet, I always thought
that I was your sliver of a masterpiece.

It’s not everyday that someone calls a girl beautiful
when she’s got bags the size of small countries
under her eyes or a flannel with five missing buttons.
But the way you held my collarbone in your hands,
or carried my sculptures to the shows, or bent
your life a little differently just to fit my mold.

I guess our love just grew old
to you, but I never thought that a parking lot,
after hours of drizzle and haze
rising from the blacktop, would look better
than the canopy we made from old t-shirts
that hung above our bed with a mobile
of everything I ever made up in my head
that you could be.