tonight just the hint-est of moons
and my own breath to obscure it
the cold makes my hands hurt
as I fumble in my pocket
feeling for the surety of keys
someone today, in no doubt naïveté,
informed me I must not have wanted
to love him or I would have
found a way to make things work
as if somehow by forcing the faucet
to open all the wider more than air
would descend into that cracked sink
in spite of the break in the water main
I didn’t have the breath left to tell her
ain’t nothing that easy, but either she’ll
write that chapter for herself or bleed out
shaving off bits of herself to make things fit
that just weren’t meant to be
© Sarah Whiteley
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