love poem that ends at popeyes

it’s valentine’s day & i hear tires on the slick streets
it is raining a slow steady rain
the kind that makes me saddest because it seems
endless & even after the sky having forgotten
its big-eyed blue stands aloof distant
while the sun mumbling from her side of the bed
settles into a doze
i am thinking of the meal i won’t have to brave
those streets clamp-thighed in a passenger seat to eat
or the flowers i will not have to accept awkwardly
because flowers are such strange gifts why undress
the ground just to prove i am special?
we could go to the botanical gardens hold hands
smell the smells that come at me all at once in a sneeze
or we could pull over on the highway run through fields
of bonnets which are sometimes so buckled with sky
they look bruised

why has no one ever loved me that way a bonnet
might engorge itself with blue so much it is a new
color unnameable breathless my loves hold
their breaths calculating they want me to look
at the food & the flowers & the tiny golden heart
run through with a golden thread & say thank you thank you
yes i am wearing silver but now i will wear
only gold & then they expect me to lie down quickly
as if we are children & the fields are bloated with green & it is may

somewhere the man who doesn’t love me though i wish
i could say the same is pacing a supermarket floor
his body a reflection in the waxed tile
really he is two men one flesh man one floor man
& both are moving in a direction away from me
they are picking out fistfuls of roses or maybe tulips
maybe assorted flowers with daffodils
& they know the woman he really loves will dip her nose
into them like a doe & say thank you thank you
& she will kiss him with her tacky lips & for the first time
i am not angry that he might lay her down
& ask if he can do the things he will do

of course she will say yes that is what you say
when you love someone right? it’s what i would say
& this time not because i’ve learned what happens
when you say no or when you say nothing at all

i am not sad about whatever she will let him do
or what she will do to him to make him smile
make his mouth form & his breath catch the emptiness where a few
of his teeth used to be & make it ache
it’s a good ache when something is missing & people still love you
i want him to be satisfied i want him to be happy
also i want to be happy we can do that separately
or we can do it together i am a hopeless
romantic i still make wishes before i blow out candles
last week i asked an oracle when not if
i’d find true love it said bad reception try
again girl & i am trying i am lying
in bed with my arms around myself thinking of what
i will eat when i get hungry i am willing
to wait for what i want like when i pull up
to the window & the cashier says it’ll take ten minutes
for the spicy dark & i say yeah yeah that’s ok
i still want it & i pull my car over & i play
my music & i imagine the fried flecks of flour
smothering in the saliva of my mouth
& oh the biscuits & oh the honey & oh the red beans
in their salty velvet & i think this is my own gold
it is not daffodil gold it is not supermarket-roses
gold it is not a thin- stringed gold attached to a locket
of expectations with my face clasped between
two composite hearts

but it is good & it is filling & it is enough