We Are All Terrible
You are married to my ex-boyfriend.
And you, and you, and you.
I mean, I don’t know you
but I knew my ex-boyfriends
and I know they’ve married,
so I know that you and you and you exist.
It’s been long enough
that I hope they’re happy.
I hope you’re happy.
I hope they grew out of the reasons
they became ex-boyfriends.
I haven’t grown out of anything at all,
but oh!—you there, narrowing your eyes
as if I were a skunk or a setting sun,
it’s true! I married your ex-boyfriend!
We’re very much in love
and just as annoying together
as we were individually.
With our horse laughs
and emotional avoidance,
and now, our couples’ yoga class.
It’s funny, really, isn’t it?—
how well
everything’s worked out.
Leaning Out of the Afternoons
I fling my sad nets toward the sea
and haul in old boots strung with bent fishhooks.
The job’s a bore.
I fling and I haul, I fling and I haul,
all while half-blinded by glittering waves.
Sounds pretty, I know,
but even the ocean gets old.
Heck, it is old, and a little torn at the seams.
If there be monsters here,
they take the form of gulls
endlessly threading the down-at-heel border
between changeless
and hopeless. They needle the waves
with their laughter.
They suture their throats to the air.
Tomorrow, I’ll Tell People It Was Food Poisoning
Feeling vaguely fin de siècle, languorously ill,
as if consumption, as if wasting
but just wasted
tho’ a little pink wine ne’er should hurt me—
avoiding
the hair of the dog since morning and
one eye open like an over-cooked egg:
the whites rubbery, the irises chalked
like a hopscotch with fake sunshiny cheer.
How does this happen at 37?
Rippling the bathwater, unrequited by images
of alternate paths with babies and studios but I am beached here—
The path to heaven is paved with cockleshells.
Mineral wings absent of meat.
I am not tired yet of anything but not knowing how to live.
