After
I slam the hungry
trunk hard against the last load of our things,
I walk the hollow
halflight of my steps, the sound bouncing off
the walls and through our
attic. The street outside growls a thousand
cars. House fills with light,
bulbs burn, smiling their reflections against
the lemoned wood. They smile 10
like lost arguments. Like her, hands holstered
on her hips. Like our
cat cannot help but smile no matter what
the circumstances,
lips ever up-curved in his side profile.
Then
I hold my friend in the quiet of her
empty room, rolling
up in carpet-vacuumed emptiness, that
houses us. She sits 20
on the floor. She makes a ninety-degree
angle, trying to
become drywall, bark herself into the
aging Oak, spread her
body’s paint across the primer-plastered
walls. We, lying down,
stare up the ceiling. “The Stars stay,” she says.
“God! That fucking piece
of shit, that sonnuva bitch! that fucking—
Later, 30
she snores against my lap, crumpled, fetal,
a penny falls from
her pocket. I chuck the worthless Lincoln,
listen to its plucked
echo. “We’ll find other Stars,” I whisper,
petting her red hair
the way she likes, then switchflip into dark.
Under green star glow
I gawp at a letter from our rental
company, frowning 40
down at paper—Cracks. Renovate. Vacate.
Sincerely, Apologies.
An ozone kind of problem, The fracture
growing below us
now—
fast, nebulous thing.
It starts slow, as all things do. She loses
a few bobby pins,
some gum—I lose the change jar. But it grows.
A thirsty black hole 50
would drink us up if we decided stay.
Huddled together
inside, pregnant gulf beneath expanding,
the music of chairs
clattering our bodies away, into
each other, the hole
stealing us one day through open threshold.
Down there, waiting, we
shiver, skin against skin, clutching lean hopes
that our universe 60
will fall its own way down and follow us.
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