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after long summer days spent serving strangers saturated by the routine stint of shopping, bagging and tagging domestic lives in brown grocery bags, i walked in to the reeking smell of liquor lurking by the length of our rented apartment.
each night marred by the stench of inebriant bile over evening bleached sinks. each morning impaled by his acid-dipped words and my tired out tears. empty bottles piled under the frame of our fawn wood bed.
on night-trips to the bathroom: accidental spills stained carpets unwashed, down wooden floors circled hollow glass, and my tepid toes tread the boarded floors like each creak was a minefield waiting to erupt into the angered fury of the man who had my hand.
when he stopped drinking, i thought loving a sober man would be easy. but the uninvited scent of lavender dances around me as i wash and clean. "dinner?" "no." pumpkin eaters never starve. nights pass in quiet epiphany as i lay on a bed of black dahlias, the sheets scorched in flecks of fire, charred from my indignant fists clumping petals of infidelity.
but just as his disdain, my anger buried itself somewhere deep within the lacerated crevices of my fickle heart, like a rabbit burrowing from a hunter's sight. the twinkle of a jewel not privy to my touch, and whispering signs from strands of hair not my own on a bed i thought i owned weren't lies, but truth.
there's hardly a toil for hide-and-seek. my place, i've been put in it again. but do you leave because you hadn't been asked to stay, or do you stay when you haven't been asked to leave? a forest burnt to ash, smoke flushed after rain.
