A BRIEF INTERLUDE It’s been three years since I’ve spent the night with someone who liked me enough to get breakfast in the morning. Still, I spread my heart thin like butter on toast, hoping someone else will come along and snatch it off my plate. Still, I stumble half-dressed out of other people’s apartments and treat myself to coffee on the way home. This is not a poem that seeks to make a spectacle of loneliness.

I do not tell her that sometimes it feels like compromising yourself is part of growing up.

The poet is afraid to make any place feel too much like home because then she might have to stop running.

My brother talks about car accidents the same way I talk about family. I don’t know when he learned to forgive. I don’t remember teaching him that. I don’t remember learning it myself. His life’s ambition is to be the man my father never was: to step up to the plate, to grow into a firefighter’s uniform or ride shotgun in an ambulance. I am still stuck on the bathroom floor with my resentment.

And you might curse the one who teaches you what it feels like to cry at the bottom of the shower in the middle of the night, but it is important to learn how to get back up on your own feet and let the wolf in your throat howl at the moon once in a while.

I treat my greatest loves like seeds. I put them down and I seldom look back at what has grown behind me.

I don’t know what it is in me that yearns to be the lifeboat that people throw themselves at when they are drowning.

Girl like a garden you never volunteered to tend. Dirt all tracked into your front hall.

Regardless of whether you desire it, love is what sits at the core of the world. It is stronger than greed and hate and jealousy and pain. What brings us together will always be more powerful than what keeps us apart.

I keep rewriting this poem. I want it to make more sense. I want it to be less honest.