I felt on the shelf books and their spines Where did you go? I can’t find you, you wrote Are you still here? Object permanence Silt in the ravine and the lavender dried It helped me fall asleep without you next to me oo And I am alone most of the time I awake and analyze my mind Don’t do that, a website says And I can’t help but picture your bed Tobacco and figs A chicken at night slaughtered in the barn behind my studio I walk through the fireflies Miniaturized in a jar It’s a dollhouse ensconced by glass I break the glass pick up a shard cut my eye and call it “conceptual art” Go to bed shh Go to bed shh I’ll be there when you wake up I’m still here though I’m not kissing your ear oo When you read this, I'll be 1,000 miles from where you left me Lifting the pillowcase to the great reveal of another time and place Fabric folding in onto itself like a nude kissing herself in a painting

I lift a glass from the cabinet I shoot it once into your eye The truth lies there I run My hands through a mirror When I was a girl, no one combed my reflection When you said you didn’t want to hurt me You were setting it up You were setting it up You knew you would I told Nik on the phone, “If a relationship could have a report card assigned to it, I’d assign no one an A.” “A 90 is an A,” he said. You got a D in bed. Thank you for granting me permission and touching my head before You went down the drain— I couldn’t look away. I told my therapist I wanted a shittier version of me and a less shitty version of you Why can’t technology do what we want it to do? She said, “What would the shittier version of you be? A lot like me?” No gap in my tooth No tattoo on my wrist No tears No tears “Don’t cry,” you said. “It wasn’t amorous.” “It’s okay to cry; I know it’s shocking.” I called you a misogynist to your ex-wife She said she touched your heart and felt ice Melt, several times we were frozen in the mirror And I study the lines on your face I imagine your unborn daughter’s face She won’t be mine and besides Where does the life go? In your eyes The life, the life bowing down On wooden floors, I open the door—“There’s no one left,” I said. I miss you so much It’s grave: the cemetery with its names cast into diaphanous earth. My grandfather Carved stone; you always made me feel Alone, alone alone Thanks for the practice. “Silence is a sentence,” says the analyst. And what part of your life will I miss by stepping outside of it? I want to miss nothing I want to bow down to nothing I disappear completely into the grass where we last walked hand-in-hand past the bench with the couple listening to a transistor radio. What’s the news? Where were you? When I said I couldn’t find you in my head, I didn’t mean to scare you.

Once upon a time I was alive alive alive alive Once upon a time I was alive alive alive Then the mirror came in the morning and the mirror did not look like me Gravity struck from the clouds I held my hands to my temples There was tension in the air Between the living and the dead naked in bed together apart alone alone alone alone alone alone alone alone Watching the fish in its tank killing the fish in its tank I was a fish in a tank Throwing up gin on the curb in Pittsburgh the Christmas lights reflecting idiocy of the family romance No, mother no— don’t go I made the bed and kissed your head And frankly, it’s never enough I tattoo this lack on my wrist to signify my fear of separateness But I stand on my feet am a person who loves you more than you love me Too and it’s pathetic how awestruck I get remembering the grass It meant nothing The flowers, dying The world’s at an impasse "Don't be a fuck-up now," I say to you telepathically You rub my soul the right way I was a turtle in her shell I was hiding away, I'm scared of the in-between spaces And the ring on the dresser is open in a box Its diamonds catch the light I think of holding your hand The diamonds pressing into your hand Then I took a picture there was no film in the camera so I didn’t capture it because you can't capture it You can’t capture someone you can’t hold somebody down you can’t hold somebody down you can’t cage a person nor a bird nor a sentiment nor a feeling Love passes