I crawl
into your photograph, inch open the cupboard behind
your shoulder, pull out a chipped glass kept
for summer root beer. I hate your diet kind. Tastes
like how plastic smells, but I drink it anyway. Why
won’t you try the real thing? I grab my belly to signify
my poisoning, then I make our bed. I close your empty
pizza-binge box, stack the manic lyrics on the keyboard,
feel you posing your hollow smile. Since you’re so musical,
I ad-lib a song about dancing ‘round your vomit as it
bubbles up from the bathtub drain. Neither one of us
is sexy in that scenario, which is what Chicago
in your twenties should be, if anything.
I hold us
between thumb and middle finger, kneel curbside,
catch my bitter breath. Tiny pools of sweat break out
across my forehead to gather and branch with
the bishop’s ash cross. A drop slips my brow, plummets
toward the picture like a rogue flock bird, and
slaps you in the face.
Header photograph © Jason D. Ramsey.
Cyndie Randall is a writer with a poetry degree and a therapist who once lived in a psych hospital. She now lives with her nature-loving family in a little town on Michigan’s Kalamazoo River. Theirs is the house with the loud and never-ending music.
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