Riddled

You bring home a carpeted cat tower even though we don’t
have any pets. It stands by the window and smells faintly of
potpourri. After a few weeks I stop asking about it and new
acquaintances are too polite to question it as if it’s a vacant
crib and not something you found on a curb. Your love turns
into inaccessible stairwells in a building that the city knocks
down. I try to pull you back into the hemisphere of our story
where we were always wet and forgiving and dizzy but you
can’t look me in the eyes without crying. You fuck someone
else with our toy and I begin to hate your Norman Rockwell
poster. I rip it into perfect quarters, hang the squares up with
magnets on the refrigerator and you move out in the middle of the night.
I spend the next two years trying to find your mouth on other
bodies. When I find a cheaper apartment on the other side of Tacoma,
the carpeted cat tower is the last thing left to move. I stare at
it and finish my beer. As I drive away, I catch it calmly saluting me
in the window. The landlord never contacts me about it and
I get my deposit back in full. I use the money from the
deposit to get a tattoo of the carpeted cat tower on my arm.
Underneath the illustration is a banner that says curiosity killed the cat
in a gothic font. The tattoo artist did a shitty job
but I don’t mind. I’m not really one to have something
permanent that’s good.

Diluted Bleach

Remember when you used to make flow charts to find answers?
You would intentionally leave them around coffee shops or bars
for strangers to find. Remember the professor? He found one of
your flow charts on a napkin in Blanco and got it screen printed
onto t-shirts for his entire immediate family. Your intimacy was
always so anonymous, so slinky, so cool. When you spoke, you
held a funnel to my mouth and poured batter down until I could
no longer breathe. You made me believe I was wall texture and
new light. When you kissed me underneath that table, I remember feeling
the first kick of a new language inside of me. Now you’re a stay-at-home dad in Reno
and your Facebook posts make me want to die.

Cowlicked

There’s nothing that scares me more
than fingerprints on the outside of windows
my vowels on an answering machine
strong features protected by screen doors
finding stale Eucharist in the bottom of my purse
a canal without a gondolier
devil’s rain