PORTRAIT

​

My friend texts me a photograph:
green-tipped mallard shaped as if by hand

planting his ridiculous orange feet
beside his mate’s deFLated body

​

on the mottled lawn. “Mourning mallard,”
my friend captions the image. “(??????

is she dead???” another friend asks.
“yes she is dead.” I click on the photo again,

struggle to locate her head in the brown
ellipse. When my cat sleeps he looks

a lot like that: almost
boundaryless. He’s here in the bathroom
while Charlie and I are putting ourselves
together in this April morning.

I really scared him recently, Charlie,
without meaning to. I hadn’t realized

what kind of ground I wasn’t treading on,
how my inner landscape fractures

under the slightest pressure.

He passes my toothbrush to me, loaded with its green
toothpaste gem, and as I’m brushing my teeth,

my hair pulled back exposing my fivehead (as the girls
on the bus used to call it), I notice Charlie

watching me, content, even amused. What? I ask
through the toothpaste foaming in my mouth.

You’re so different than from when I met you,
he says, sitting to pee, laughing now, I was

​

just remembering when you were yelling
at the train conductor on our first date.

I thought the conductor was giving me
an attitude, and practically jumped

at his throat for it, and I did that often,
even to Charlie, soon after that incident,

snapping at him with my head in the toilet,
and he left           almost for good.

Nightly I stood at my window, the sill lined with an
army of small candles, I opened the night

and asked Charlie to come back, asked
this life to bring him back. Please please

please. I didn’t care that it was pathetic.
Without my shapeless anger, the begging

was all I had,        the begging began shaping into religion,
picturing my body’s little animal

removing itself, curling alone beneath the porch,
the brevity of my life                     flickering into focus.

​

You’re much gentler now, Charlie says,
rising. Our cat finishes drinking from

the bathtub puddle, stretches and lays
into an eclipse on the ivory mat.

So known that morning, catching my
big-eyed face in the mirror next to his,

his hands cupping my human shape.
I decided I didn’t want to suffer,

decided, yes, to be loved, yes.