I’m trying to dismantle your bones and stack them in the corner
like a pile of onions, like the forty milk crates that are dropped off every
morning, but your bones don’t want to be handled and so I have to settle
for your skin instead.
My parents sat me down at the dinner table last night and held their spoons
upright in their hands like silver stars, then told me the worst news of all:
I didn’t get to see you anymore. They say
I’m a coward for wanting you so much, and that I need to move on.
So I go to the doctor and he tells me there’s something wrong with me.
The magazines in the waiting room are about sad girls with ribs
like toothpicks and I wait for my diagnosis,
but it never comes.
Sometimes I want to break all the dishes in the house,
just to hear them shatter.
Maybe it’s that feeling of violence, that beautiful, terrifying feeling
that only comes around twice a year. The first time I wanted to feel it,
I drove the car so fast down the road at midnight
that a tree ripped into the metal
and the auto insurance wouldn’t cover it.
At least I wasn’t drunk, at least I wasn’t full of liquor and gin
the way my grandfather was when he hit that deer
at age seventeen.
He told me those eyes were the scariest things he’d ever seen.
I believe him but I just have to keep hoping that someday
I’ll be able to hold you in bed, with our limbs tucked around
one another like a sweater around its wearer,
and we’ll feel whole again.