Tell me about all your ex-lovers.
Tell me about Elizabeth, who threw your computer out the window
in anger and watched its glass screen smash into pieces
on the ground below after you forgot to take her out
on the weekly dinner date to an Italian restaurant.
Or Virginia, who ended up wearing more hospital gowns
than evening gowns and had a list of scars
longer than a rap sheet. Show me all the places
on your neck that have held hickeys the same way
we held each other after sex the first time, spooned
in a freezing hotel bed with hair in the shower drain.
Read me every love letter you’ve ever received,
every drunken text you’ve ever sent, the wilted
bouquets of roses and dandelions that you thought
would equate to apologies but ended up as little
more than debris from a disastrous relationship.
I even want to know what it was like to fuck
the first boy you ever touched, and whether
being inside him felt as familiar as your own skin
or if he kept your blue sweater and told all his friends
that it was “just some girl’s,” and not another man’s.
Let’s burn all those Polaroids of the two of us
standing on the Atlantic shore together right before
we broke up. Let’s burn them and start over,
start clean. As soon as the ward nurse
lets you off of suicide watch, we can love each other
like we were meant to.