No matter how quiet we try to be, the elderly neighbors next door stop playing their electric guitar to hear us come.

An innocuous question the friendly waitress asks everyone rends down your chest bleeds out your heart.   When will you heal?

Dark streets. Count the couples.  Are they happier than we are?  No. No. Yes. No. No. Maybe.

You leave a fresh roll of toilet paper for me in the bathroom.  I find it at 3:30am.

Before we could stop her, the photo shop girl deleted 72 pictures of her friends from the memory card she tried to sell us.  A quiet rage of having to print picture after picture day after day of other people’s happiness.  We refuse to buy it.

If you talk to one more stranger in a café I’ll scream.

The phone call to Judith in Vermont:  Her old friend, who quit smoking 15 years ago died yesterday of lung cancer.  I quit six years ago.  Judith quit two years ago.  You live in second hand smoke.  How much time do we all have?

No, I don’t know what I want.  I just want to be here.  What do I have to do to be here?

The mediocre sex is great.  The great sex makes us shout many stupid things. I boast to Adriene, “I taught English to the neighbors.”  She says, “I think they already knew those words.”

How kind you are to the rest of the world.  Behind your back I grin like a dumpling wife.

*Knit 1 Pearl 1 decrease*; repeat

*How do I make this better how do I make this better?* repeat

*Knit 1 Pearl 1 decrease*; repeat

*How do I make this better how do I make this better?* repeat

[Those] Unspoken conversations about those seven months become tattoos. The kind of tattoos you get when you are drunk and enraged and then after you leave the tattoo parlor you get hit by a car.

It’s your mother’s house. It’s your father’s bed.  We still make love.

When we both realize how happy we are, we remember we’re old and are going to die sooner rather than later.  I start eating all the bread rolls.  You order another beer.

You talk to every janitor building manager counter person you wave a hundred times a day as we walk past the shop windows you offer maté and cookies when the electrician comes up to fix things you bring flowers to your favorite barrister at your favorite coffee shop.  I think, would they hide me from the Nazis or would they help round me up?

I am too fat to wear the negligee.

The middle of the night I was getting a drink of water I didn’t realize you had gone back to bed I started whisper-crying your name I don’t want to be in the same house as you and die alone in this dark hallway.

Trying too hard to be the perfect wife even I find me annoying.

I think I took a good picture.  You feel upset.  It looks like a divorce, you say.  But I think who else would put up with me?  It’s just a good picture.

The other possibilities:  I will choose despair I will not show up you will die of a broken heart waiting by the gate I will become small and mean and live with lots of cats you will marry a younger woman who accommodates you I will be spared betrayal by being really thin and beautiful.

The ocean bashing into the jetty a finger running down the piano keys.

This is what I hate about love and this love.  I want him to be happy more than I want to be right.  Even when I’m really right.

5:45 am standing in the cold kitchen writing this in florescent light.  I suddenly hear a small fart. It must be the neighbor next door.  I finish a sentence and then your voice the voice I love the voice I love the softest kindest voice I love the only one I want in a dark morning asking “que pase?” and I say my tummy and I got up and decided to write a poem and you stop hugging me, say “so write a poem I’ll go pee” and in your half nakedness just a tee shirt you recite a poem, “Pee pee pee pee pee pee peeee.  Pee pee pee pee pee pee peeee.”  And I dance to it in utter joy.

Back in New York color drains out of my life.  It’s not even beautiful like black and white. It’s just bad coloring. Like gray brown the dead mouse that didn’t make it all the way to its home before it died in the living room.