The Odyssey

Your birthday comes every once and a while

and I want to fall off the map or out of a car

and run ten miles and let some guy with brown hair

put his knees between mine at a bar at two p.m. 

in the soft sunshine and on the inside of his arm

is black ink and I won’t think about you or how

your back is always to the blue sea and every day

closer to ten years away from Ithaca. Disgraced,

alone, white dress wilting from heat. I won’t be

a young woman when you come back to me, 

wind in your sails and war on your fingertips. 

Poets sing about this: your fucking, my not-fucking,

my tapestries, the cyclops of this rage––I’m nobody;

I’m nobody; you made me nobody. I want to grab 

your black and white suit and ask who are you? 

Who are you to go & never come back? 

I blow out your candles at the cemetery. 

You love b-side records & pretending you discovered

me: unobvious in my beauty, deep cut, slow burn,

your lips on my spine, your voice in my head saying

gorgeous––like it hurt. Despite what you might have heard,

I’m not particularly faithful to your ghost, 

not even the haunting of your body next to mine

on the cement in a rainstorm, the water ruining

your grey shirt’s collar: your neck. Over-exposure. Like 

in the photos you begged for, stuffed in your five dollar

lamp shade. Where were your gods then,

in the back of your car at midnight, tracing circles on my shin?

The last thing you ever said to me––called out across the street––

I’m trying to earn love like what we had. Oh fuck that.

I hope the ocean is a cold place & everything is backlit

against the shape of my name.