my favorite lover

i spent the morning sipping coffee, curled up with Billy*, my favorite lover.
to be fair, everyone is my favorite lover in the moment, including myself.
spontaneous and fresh
his words moved through my bones like espresso jazz fused with kundalini
i kept him on my tongue while the light grew from warm to neutral
and the grains of the day slipped through the neck of morning
i was paralyzed to all other tasks
his talent to romanticize so delightfully distracting
not romanticizing in an Ovid-esque way of course
but rather unearthing the majesty of cracked wood
there is beauty in the cracks, he tells me
our lives are unfinished floorboards collecting dust
they are not evenings spent at the Adriatic Sea
and, even if they were, there would of course still be
cracks in the sand.

*billy collins

And then of course there were there were the neighbors

I worried the mice would come for our crumbs,
It wasn't much but it was all that was left in the breadbox.

I refused to recycle and tossed egg shells on the floor.
My passive aggression became a performance art,
An audience of barely one.

We tended to the plants on the fire escape,
The ones plucked from the garden of my mother,
A willful intention to undo the past by trying to control the future.
In the end when they could no longer bend to light,
When roots sat parched and leaves hung heavy, exhausted in their grief,
We simply turned and threw them out.