Breakable Contents

Garden Escape

Three days passed before you noticed me again

Sleeping underneath your garden

You threw bird seeds onto my wasted stomach

And told me to eat. I turned over until my ribcage

Touched the natural carnage.

You kept me there until I caved, thrashing

Arms wildly and beating the pavement

Promising to never come back if I left again

But we were both more familiar with that lie

Than we were with our own collarbone skin

That night I cut my thumb open on the ring you

Gave me last fall. I bled, onto your tile floor

Until you made me go sit in the bathtub. Tragedies

Wrote themselves behind your tonsils yet you

Were always the right amount of quiet, and

Your neighbors never came by. Your living

Room grew mold an absurdly large amount. This was no

surprise; you were as negligent as fossilized dream

catchers. Nightmares decorated crown moldings and

the tall part on top of the lights that you can never reach

I couldn't stop shaking as you pulled me through the

Produce section of the grocery store. That was

the moment you realized the damage that had been done

in your name. You promised me, the blue lipped girl

sitting cross legged in your shopping cart, that there were

good photographs of us. Then, opened the scrapbook to find

Poisoned birthday notes and knotted violin strings that

Fell heavy through your icicle finger nails. 3 bottles of vodka

Later and you were just drunk enough to show me that

You once were kind. I looked up at you,

Sloppy hands, garden thumbs, and all. And crawled on

Hands and knees out onto the porch. You followed

Until I unshackled your wrists. Starved, you tried to follow

But were too weak to keep up. You cut your feet on the broken

Porch light glass and screamed for me to fix you,

But voices don't typically carry past the garden.