I still think of you as my ventriloquist, saying all the words I could never
but with your hands, sometimes your mouth. Entire languages
I thought were unreadable that you translated so perfectly.
Whenever you opened your mouth I saw whole novels
writing themselves behind your back molars,
foreign texts burning out a thousand letters on your canines.
Two weeks ago the forecast predicted a storm of sunflowers
with a mild chance of tulips, and every time I opened the window
to check the weather, the sky reminded me
of that childhood game He loves me, he loves me not.
Now I forever associate open doors with uncertainty.
Before you, irony was being terrified of flight
but dreaming of swallowing whole birds like candied plums.
After you, irony is searching out whole birds to swallow
so I can choke and cease to live just so I won’t have to think about you anymore.
How do I explain this loss, like mold slowly forming in the dampened corners
of every floorboard, how do I write about the day you kneeled
in the wet soil of the garden underneath a hailing sky
just to understand what being beaten up
by someone other than yourself felt like for once?
Yesterday I caved.
I opened the window.
I wrote my own poem without waiting for you to write it for me.
I cleaned the mold from every room.
I started over with the absence of you.