when his fork clinks against the breakfast plate,
my day is lit by a covetous rage, a fist swollen with
a hunger for the freshest passages of air I can quickly
forge through him and now a much less civilized feeling
has knotted itself inside my throat, over every word
on my tongue, about to break inside this fucked-up air.
I am trying to teach us both to keep our hands to
ourselves, so I slide by him and decide against any
bloody, unfortunate appearances on the news or on
my mother’s face at the table this early on Thursday.
I want to drive nails through every letter of his name but
we happen to share a name we just so happen to not
wear outside and dead men have manufactured this house
this way, where only one last name spills onto applications
and I don’t trust his absence or his chew or his trips to a
bathroom where he takes too long for us to believe. I am
too overprotective of a house too many men who loved me
have died in and he lays on the just laundered, barely lilac
tablecloth, cream cheese pound cake from his mother who
wants to pay for him in this sweet way and I abandon
my attempts at what I viewed in the video but I still want
to know if it will do any kind of comparable work on him.