Mistakes of the Last Month

I bought wine when I wanted to leave. I said yes or I said no. Overate, went to bed early. Let my perfume get hot in the trunk. Lent a pen. Didn’t finish and finished too fast. I forgot sunscreen and planted flour specks over brown spots. Burst a blood vessel in the pad of my thumb, rushing the words. I misspelled something and forgot what it was. I read storytellers ride the buses as the bruises, saw untitled as untilted, and let myself believe that such mistakes could endear me to some kind of truth.

Three-Hour Drive

When we headed home it topped at 104. You said glass-walled furnace and we didn’t laugh but breathed hot. I fell asleep three times. Every time I jolted up I’d feel the seatbelt under my jaw and right then be your light ponytail; the flied cow; the sign in the cornfield—farm market—held up by a rope; the hopeful angle of the satellite dish’s throat.

Dysthymic

You seethed, old mothballs steaming from the cracks of my great-aunt’s green trunk, but with less reason. We clatter-echoed big but clamshell empty down the stairwell. I hoped no one could hear; it’s how I’ve spent all this time, to now. It was curls of rubber beside the bypass stretched like beaching whales. What you yelled at was oil on the surface, noncombinant with my body. What you heard was some of me, heterogeneous.