Two years ago my cousin Caroline came out by making
a magnet poem and sticking it to the fridge downstairs in her kitchen-
I love the softness of her breasts and the way her long red hair
drapes itself down my back like a mermaid when I hold her,
it read. Each magnet was placed haphazardly on the white metal,
a hit and run in which the driver of the vehicle flees
the scene of the crime twice as fast as they came upon it.
A few days later it was taken out, the spot replaced with grocery lists,
bills, calendar pages as the weeks went by, slipping slowly
into one another as fluidly as melting butter in a pan.
And I remember the day Caroline’s girlfriend (now ex-girlfriend, to be exact),
showed up on my aunt’s doorstep with a bouquet of pears
wrapped in green cellophane, their halves already leaking juice,
and we all thought she was apologizing to Caroline
for throwing her computer out the third-story window of her apartment
during a lover’s quarrel, the sound of its glass screen smashing
on the ground below akin to the noise a heart makes when it breaks.
But then I thought about that lonely space remaining on the fridge,
that space that was filled in with so many other things
but was never ever truly whole or right again, and it was then
that I realized Caroline’s ex-girlfriend wasn’t apologizing for her crime;
she was apologizing for loving another girl
because she knew the only way
my aunt and uncle would ever invite her over to dinner
would be if she atoned for a sin that neither she nor Caroline
ever thought deserved to be placed on God’s “bad” list.