AFTERCRASH IN THE GARDEN

It’s not like we had enough room, anyway, your words so full they spill 

out of my mouth, greedy as an empty vase, wishing for violence 

just to feel full. In the living room, the burgundy rug we forgot to throw out 

absorbs the spilled water like a bloodstain, the glass shards like mirrors 

too ashamed to be windows. When I look at you, I can’t tell if it’s your body 

or its too-large reflection through the shattered glass. When I look 

at myself, I know it’s a reflection, because all reflections are lies. 

On the rug, strewn tulips lay like shards of plastic, unremarkable, so I tell myself: 

this is not a tragic scene—just a replica of one. In other words, 

I am not sure if I was ever alive, so you can’t call us dead, surely. 

                                                                  Still, I am not sure 

who I am talking to anymore, what I am supposed to call mine—

the burgundy rug, these glass pieces that forget their shape the harder 

I try to kick them together, your cross-armed stock-image stance as still 

and buried as a good, good mine.                    Ticking. Waiting. 

It’s been three years and still you haven’t fixed the leak in our bedroom ceiling, 

citing the drought and money issues, but you didn’t have to try very hard—

it takes two to keep a dead thing moving. The next morning, 

you’ll claim your side of the bed is wet because you cried after 

you hurled the tulip vase at me. Cried all night long. 

                                                      But it rained yesterday. 

The first time in months. There’s wet trails not down your face 

but blossoming darkly on the wallpaper, the same way 

a paintbrush pressed too hard crushes every image into 

the same oversaturated bloodstain, even the most beautiful, 

especially the most beautiful. Everyone was going crazy about the end

of the drought—if only you’d looked outside, or up from your own body 

so dry it must be cracking. I would know. I was there, sprawled in the dirt, 

mouth as open as it was empty, letting the water fill my nose and ears and palms 

and thinking: is this what it’s like, being watered as a plastic flower? 

                                                                                            Really?

Three years ago, I’d made fun of the vase for its absurd shape 

when you first got it for our garden’s extra tulips. I had spent 

the afternoon pulling weeds to delay talking to you about moving in together—

which is why you probably bought the vase, too. What a pity, I remember thinking, 

the earth rupturing between my fingers, roots grown long for survival

choking themselves into knots. They could be beautiful if only they stopped multiplying. 

When I came back inside, tired from killing the unkillable, my first instinct 

was to laugh at the florid, garish thing. What’s the point of the huge stomach 

if the neck is so thin? How much space is wasted?  

                                                     But what I didn’t understand 

was that nothing here would ever become pregnant, just hollow, 

as if swallowing more and more space could thin us into existence. 

What I always believed, and so could never know, was that 

you could teeter a vase on the edge of a bed and I’d spend three years 

thinking: if I can keep it from falling to the bruised floor long enough, it’ll stay 

when I let go, that physics will forgive us, as if physics had anything to do 

with attraction or the tears running through our walls. 

That the ensuing crash is just because I needed to hold you still 

for one, or three, or twenty years more. You could ask me what we really

look like and I’d shatter every full wineglass against our mirror 

until I realize how we all love the same, which is to say love the same 

types of pain. And even then, I’d replant the tulips, over and over, 

                                        until the weeds swallow the soil itself.