"Divorce" by Katie LeCours
Fused as one body
for so long that
I forget where I
end and you begin
until you, the right
half of our brain
have run off with
an older
left side.
In sympathy,
the left side of our
face slouches,
I cannot speak
without slurring
and I cannot remember
how to spell my
our? name.
this betrayal is baffling.
bodies are meant to
stay whole. brains cannot
simply be cut in
half. I can only
analyze. I balanced
our check book every
month, did our taxes.
wrote down every argument
we had in first-order
logical notation. recorded all
your contradictions. it was
up to you to
feel for us both.
to write our songs
about tomatoes and scrambled
eggs. to paint our
portraits, our landscapes and
mostly our living room.
to blow
seven hundred dollars and
twenty-two cents because
we didn’t have a
crocodile skin lamp and
it called to you.
to rearrange the letters
in our names and
to finger-paint poems
on the walls of
the dishwasher.
your side of the
skull is empty and
silence shrieks as I
do the crossword puzzles
and leave space for your twittering
comments. I have done
my research and not
only does your new
left side not know her
times tables, the upkeep
costs twice as much
and she does not
have the last seven
years of your breaths
on file. she cannot
graph your happiness because
it is wrapped in
mine
and she has stolen
my post-it notes,
and our
past.
|
