When we were kids an alley separated our houses, you were the new girl; all exotic from the city, your dad didn’t have calluses; called

Small things: not returning a phone call right away, not offering early enough to set tables at the spaghetti feed for the homeless, not filling

The dust settles, a fragile ceasefire in the kitchen light, the air gritty with unsaid apologies, yesterday’s words like shrapnel lodged beneath a skin of

Spread the words On the wings of Aeon Cuddle the skin Aglow with the sun When the tip of the spear Is my kith and

A sound check ignites a flame In a distance of incendiary nights Back and forth the ringing breaks As the dawn announces a new appetite

1. Morning has broken like a child opening the bedroom door. You wear my Red Sox sweatshirt, the one with the ratty collar. My pillow

Almost a year from the last harvest moon when we had to close mami’s house The towel inherited from her linen closet a mix of

I am almost as old as my dad was when he died. How young does that make him? It doesn’t matter – he’s still dead.

Nothing. Not even a look. Maybe a hand raised, to say goodbye. A distance that makes me be someone I hate. What do you do

In love speaks to hurt as it does to worth, in angles that extract and tend to leave lack. The ubiquity of words on the

Gone is my common sense, missing your face. Those pearly white teeth in a smile’s shape overtaking my thoughts. Am I a bad person? My

I tell her, it pays nothing, and the degrees are expensive, success may as well be stories you tell at campfires, and that even the

“I love this song,” I said. You said that You knew,     and that the chords made You want to take the streetcar at

I am done with dating apps. I would like to make you dinner: salmon, rice, brussels sprouts. You said you know what I want for

For heaven sake, our dear loyal friend A good husband but a boring one he’ll make He will court you chastely to the end So