This began with “I miss you”
nestled deep in the liver of pretty words
dancing illusionary around platitudes of nostalgia
the way lynchings and pogroms and Jim Crow
take a back seat when waxing poetic about the Roaring 20s
this began Art Deco
all smooth lines and steel rising above New York City
when Chrysler and Empire State vied for the heavens
when we could still see heaven
but this revisionist history
ignores begging in breadlines for something warm at night
the amputees returning home from the trenches
missing limbs from land mines
you were the FLASH! BANG! landmine
ripping smiles from this face
leaving me to sweat you out on PTSD nights
wondering if you were coming home to finish me off
you are my thousand-yard stare
you are the war story of crashing hips and desert stories
I would tell the neighbors
when they asked about the scars too visible to conceal
this began “I miss you,”
because I can still remember the beginning
when butterflies fluttered in the gut portending the future
back before we learned to fuck the way movie stars taught us:
well lit, in focus, every inch of skin captured center frame,
each retelling revealing more secrets than the last
until I could quote your inches from exposition to ending credits
even now, I can chart your body, knee to nape, lip to clit
like a family farm a man spent 90 years
getting ready to be buried in
your blustering winds do not make you a hurricane
you are not Salamis
nor Trafalgar
and this is no “I miss you” poem
because I do not miss you
no one misses fatal car accidents
we were a slow-motion rollover
ejecting victims through the windshield face-first
after you found me inhabiting the suburbs of your heart
fostering your broken parts like they were my own children
you began pushing me out one brutal word at a time
no refugee misses the ethnic cleansing
that leaves them in the wilderness
you left me in the wilderness
of this place
in my own chest
surrounded by strange tongues that speak unfamiliar words
like “lover” and “future”
I had found a home in the forever changing definitions of “us”
never expecting to be the only one to remember it that way
you were the memory
I was the action
you were the story
I was the author
but you lit the manuscript on fire
drained the blood from all of my inkwells
broke pens like fingers
and cut the voice from my throat
leaving me to point at strangers
mouth useless words,
knowing they do not understand
you are breathtaking,
but that is no compliment
you hover between regret and unfortunate accident
haunting the stairwells of this cold, empty house
the image of a girl I can see in the television static
around 2 a.m. between the whiskey and the dawn
a tree in winter that I’m not certain is dead or dormant
this began “I miss you,”
this will end with, “I survived you”but we are still somewhere else
a wounded diver in shark-infested waters
and I cannot see the shore
we are the firing squad bullet between rifle and
let justice be done
a hand grenade frozen beautiful in a starburstbefore shrapnel turns a dreamer
into a dying, wounded animal
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