Dear Sarah,

This is to inform you
That I will be setting up my gmail account
To automatically respond
With this poem
every time you email me
Spitting stupid small talk
Into my inbox.

So to answer
the questions you weren't really asking:
I'm fine, my mom is fine and yeah,
New York is great.

And to the one question you were asking but didn't:
Yes.

Yes
It has been two years
Since I was just a bad waitress
Who loved you
And you were a puppeteer
Who couldn't stand the idea
Of loving a waitress.
"You deserve someone
Who will motivate you
To get a real job"
You told me
As we stood in the hallway of your new apartment
Paint burning my lungs
And boxes ripped open
Like rib cages.

When I said that I loved you
You asked me
Why I would love someone
Who didn't love me back
As if this was something I should have known
By the way you smoothed your hair down
With shaking fingers
When I walked in.
 
Yes.
Your nervous smile
At my parents house for Passover
The way you held my hand in
The gardens in Santa Fe
and told me we would retire there
And how your naked body
Spilt into mine like milk
Onto a kitchen floor.
I sold all those postcards
To Girls Gone Wild.

Yes.
The first night I laid in bed with someone
Who wasn't you
My skin melted
And all these shimmering organs
Lay bare, flimsy and floundering
Like fish flashing technicolor deaths.
How dare you
Drag a dead sigh from my stomach
With copper wire-
That's been buried.
But still
The only reason I let her
Keep touching me
Is because she was there
And you weren't.

Yes.
I moved to the city
You never thought I would
Got a real job and an apartment in Brooklyn
The girl who once ran face-first
Into a cement wall
Painted like air
doesn't exist anymore
Now, I race the sun
To the statue of liberty every morning
Exhale freedom
Onto subway windows
Write myself letters
In beer bottles
And mail them home
And

Yes.
This is the first day
Ive thought about you
In many.
On most
You are the amen
That drips like drool
The eyelash dropping eclipses
To black out the dust
A reflex
That could only have been taught.

And then you email
The subject line says
Hey with 7 exclamation points
And every one
Is like shooting a bullet
Into a disembodied deer head
Mounted on a wall.
When I told you
I still cared about the girl
Who broke my heart the year before we met
You told me
I was desperate.
Maybe I'm just
Not as scared as you are
to admit this
I've peeled this skin
Down to citrus
And I know
I can never write you back anymore
But that doesn't mean I don't remember
The time you told me
That when I clap
It looks like I'm catching fireflies
don't you think
I still have ashes on my palm
From touching you?
don't you think
They burn
every time I touch the subway handrail?
Even when I forget
Why.

---

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Keywords : Love, Fear

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