Our Many Never Endings
You entered the bedroom and fell to your knees.
I wait the rest of my life to hear you say, I made a mistake.
Inside my chest, a mangle.
Inside yours, a deflating balloon.
You took the vacuum cleaner, the ironing board, the dish rack
and left me some lint, an iron to scorch shirts, one chipped plate.
I would like to say at least we perfected
entrances and exits, like professional stage actors
honing their craft, but even that’s a fantasy.
Mostly on TV the lions ate the hyenas
but sometimes the hyenas
formed a posse, and tore a lion up.
Occasionally you came in out of the rain
and I was glad to have you.
Copyright © 2014 by Courtney Queeney. Used with permission of the author. This poem appeared in Poem-a-Day on June 24, 2014.
“The title was born from a typo—I fumbled the phrase ‘never-ending’ in another poem. I was going through a Groundhog Day-esque breakup at the time I wrote this, and wanted to capture the bittersweet state of dividing my life from another’s. On the one hand, sorting and packing our overlapping possessions was an enormous and joyless chore; on the other, I dreaded the day it would end.”
—Courtney Queeney