I don't think I'll ever stop missing you

He was gone and I was alone
rearranging picture frames and furniture
trying to make it feel more like home
when I noticed that I was inadvertently
making a shrine to you.

I had the little gold tree from your bedroom dresser
 and weathered pictures on
your old buffet table. the only piece
of dining room furniture that is still
adorned with the piece of lace you picked
out for it. Dingy and yellow and I can't
stand the thought of replacing it.

I had hung one of your paintings-the
black stallion on the hills. It used to hang
over our record player in between the kitchen and
den. I used to watch you dance under it. and
I still can when I close my eyes. I still can
see your feet move over that linoleum floor
that was printed to look like rocks. (Oh, the 80s)

And I had put two rosaries there,
one that you brought me from your hair-brained trip
to Venezuela. We tried to tell you not to go, but no
one could ever tell you anything. I wonder where I get
that from?
One...you had been holding when you
left me. you left all of us behind, you left me
with this feeling of remorseful relief. you left
me crying in my hall bathroom. silently sobbing
even though I was supposed to expect it. Silently
sobbing so I wouldn't wake him because I wanted
in that moment
to be totally alone, not comforted, not held, not told
it would be okay because I knew I couldn't believe that.

And I'm still here pretending you're with me
or at least in the air
and while kissing your pictures, I imagine my
lips are one more time on your salty, wrinkled forehead
 and
I can smell your unwashed hair and I can hear
you say you love me. I can hear myself say it back
because there I am, standing in my dining room, talking
to you again.

ramble

nervous feelings don't have to be bad
or good sometimes they just are
what they are and can't be nothing else

I'm driving to class with these butterflies in my
gut. what for? see the girls sitting together at the
cafe table, taking in the last bit of purple sky
and coffee and it makes me miss my early twenties
miss my best friend, miss my husband
miss days where I had the time to get
day drunk in the park
am I worried because I sprayed the dog with
bug spray? worried he'll get sick? worried
I haven't taken him or the cats to the vet in a year
and that I'm a shitty pet owner for it?
worried I left him outside? worried the man
that's been hiding in girls backyards on Euclid Avenue
and attacking them when they get home, might be in mine
when I get back from school?
am I excited that the semester is ending soon? or that
he'll be home on Saturday. That I'll get to smell him and pick
up his socks?

I don't know, but class is beginning and I still have this
sinking neutrality in my gut.

sumten there to remind me

I reclined in the chair that you made
reading your mom's latest edition of
Garden and Gun while she cooked
dinner I wasn't invited to downstairs. You
claimed to be drawing me
but when I looked onto the paper, all
I saw was a collection of dots.
Somehow, I guess that's valid.

not someone like you

the best thing that could have happened to me
was you
in this sticky, tricky, inadvertent way
all the ways you tried to make me not okay
and I learned the only person I had to prove anything
to was me.
no reasons, but every attempt
to drown me. hiding behind plastic raincoats
and empty words strung together with a half empty
tank of gasoline, vitriol and your faded pale scent
of stale cigarettes.
-you tried to break me, but learned I bent-
and ain't it nice how karma
is hilarious sometimes? and ain't it funny
you thought you were really onto
something more than smoke and mirrors.
transparent again, you decide now you should
set your feet East.

yeah, I can't help but smile.

The night we broke a man

I couldn't dance on his rug the
way I wanted to. Feet
didn't fit in the squares just right.
He didn't want us to leave, but
he couldn't tell us to stay so
we left him sitting cross-legged
in the floor, shit grinning.