Your photo smile, suave
smells of stale cigarettes and ladies perfume.
You wanted no ties,
your own pulled loose and askew.
Just less than the size of my thumb,
it’s all too easy to block you out,
to squash you–like a bug,
pushing so hard a disk of white appears on the soft beneath the hardness of my nail.

But I don’t even have a photo–
She didn’t know you long enough.
No face and no name,
just some holes in my heart you were supposed to love.

In that moment before sleep
when the animals caged
in the deepest corners of our selves slip out
Do you think of me?
and whimper.

I drove myself to church each Sunday.
Somedays running late because, in winter dawn,
I’d forget to start the engine early.

The priest, hard of hearing, had a lisp that gave me reason
to ignore his sermon, leaving room to wonder
if I saw you if I’d know
and if, perhaps, you’d love me
or walk past, fast, pointedly staring at the ground.