Other Days
       

Among envelopes marked second chance and final
notice—the various warnings of a debt I once
refused to acknowledge—I find my name in
the loops of her furious script above the address

of an apartment building long since demolished
for parking. The streetlight which blazed our room
as we faced away in sleep still stands. Its arched neck
is rusted, its bulb blown and forgotten, so the steps

of the chapel that shares its corner become at night
a blackened well which once released a man with
his arm outstretched for money. What I gave or
did not have to give him does not matter.

I open her letter—forbidden tract—its seal tearing
at my thumb, and we are paused on a rope-slung
bridge over a valley river. Why I burned every photo
and the letters we passed to suture our distance

is the business of flames, which grew yellow to green,
the flicker of wrapping paper without flash and heat
and the fire smothered until I soaked it in kerosene,
each word and each embrace like hornets from a nest.

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Copyright © 2016 Jordan Rice All rights reserved
from Constellarium
Orison Books
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission