Just when you think it’s over,
winter returns for a day
and maybe another,
hunks of fluff on blossom,
and you receive a message
from a former lover, “it’s over”
between him and his husband,
third divorce this year close
to you and you have had
them both, been had
before and a couple
of times during, together
and separate. This is how
we love now, in turns.
All of us it seems,
are too much for one person,
too brittle by all that has happened,
and hasn’t that we wanted to–
too much for one person
to hold without breaking, you,
and the too-many yellow tulip bulbs
bobbing along the sidewalk enwrapping
a home they never wanted.
Your friend was not “The One”
but that is how you
named them, The One you met first,
and The Other, a former fuckboi
named Brad. The One who was and wasn’t
writing an unfinished novel
about the fall of the moon and The Other,
who said, years ago now, over branzino,
absurd, the moon is spared by having nothing
that can be mined or burned for fuel.
It shimmers in its uselessness.
The One said, yes, but what if it didn’t shimmer
and the coastal cities drowned,
if in the world of the story it’s dust is fuel,
like the memory of a last kiss,
and so is brought back
to the one it splintered from, in pieces?


The morning after his call
you listen to The One work out
the mechanics of lunar destruction
walking through the park.
Yesterday’s snow holds on
in shadow under evergreen bushes.
Trees alive with song,
it sounds like all of the birds
were born this morning, you say.
No mention of the break up
It was both of theirs fault it seems
Or no one’s and The One knows
if he doesn’t say more
you will want to ask
and that is what is comfortable,
between you, the wanting and not saying,
and you don’t want the walk
or morning to end,
as if it were a Sunday,
but the path ends at the lake.
You look for words in ripples
on the edge where wet bank turns sky.
There are none. Evil to imagine
the moon no longer the moon,
the novel shouldn’t be written
so is left unfinished.

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