How To

Don’t you see, the materials for these poems
are the one gift our breakup gave me
freeing up my chest of that good
and wholesome love I had for you
left room for all of this black ink.

Loving you was so fucking hard,
because you were such a good man.
You never did anything wrong,
never looked at other women,
never wondered what life would be like
without me. I did enough of that for both of us,
and it was exhausting.

Now I poke at your fleshy parts with a stick
trying to provoke life from you.
I plead with you to be human,
to show me that our years together
didn’t just dissolve on your tongue.

I ask you to break my heart again,
because I was too shocked to believe it
the first time. Can you show me
the mechanics, exactly where did you
make the incision?

And please give me direction
on the way you were able to swallow
7 years. I keep choking, my dear,
I keep choking on those years.
They are so heavy and so sharp.
How did you swallow them so easily?