You change the locks on your apartment, wash everything
he touched. Even if it means scrubbing the toilet bowl,
the bedsprings, the kitchen floor three times over.
Smash plates one after the other, dump out all the mint tea.
Learn how to pronounce your name without his immediately
after it, it’s hard at first, like holding a peach pit in the precise
spot between tongue and tongue’s roots. Lie awake
in a pool of your own sweat remembering his kisses,
eat cereal naked in the kitchen until it tastes like sawdust
just to get the taste of him out of your mouth. Start treating
your body like kitestrings, get tangled up in bad men
who fuck you over the same table you didn’t have dinner on
buy little black dresses then tear them up and dance
under their confetti like a séance. Record your voice
saying his name and play it on loop, burn the little bridge
in your backyard for real then light up the bedsheets
with the stain from the first time. Make people afraid
of how much they love you; steal lingerie to wear
in the beds of foreign strangers. Write sympathy cards
for yourself but send none of them. Miss him.
Go lie in the carcass of a giant blue whale beached
on the shore nearest your house; make a home from
its rib bones only, rattle them until they match the sound
of your heart. Dismantle the carcass with your bare hands.
Start over again.
Start clean.