It’s not that he folded my laundry, although
I could never say no to a man who knew
the drumbeat of the washer-dryer like the rhythm
of his pulse. Not that he made me spaghetti or did
my dishes afterwards, patted my bloated stomach
as I clenched a pillow between my thighs and hugged
it until I felt like a person again. Not the splinter he extracted
from my big toe with nail clippers, gently, not like me,
who wanted to cut it out from the first. It’s not that
he rhymes service with the word love, and devotion lives
in every chamber of his heart. Not that he calls every sock
I own a lover for having found its match in the cotton miasma
of my sheets, everything a little damp from the machines
that don’t work all the way and eat my quarters by the fistful
besides every two weeks. It’s because he folded my socks
at all, carefully tucked them inside my drawer, and came to lie
with me, legs over legs, hand over my breast, small zaps from where
my skirt twisted around his fingers like a lie told so many times
it’s become a truth. This is truth: lying here, with the cold peering in
from the windows like a lost child, and us huddled here, his warm breath
in my ear. I’ve never been so afraid of warmth before.
Fiction - ISSUE #28