The Honest House

In an effort not to crawl back to you, I crossed the 2 train off my subway map in blue ink, called it a river, sold my canoe.

Swept the soot from the chimney into a vase, scattered it all over Manhattan. Husband, I pretended it was your ash.

Spoke your name in past tense and still, when we found ourselves in the same bar, phoned a mystic. Told her I was seeing ghosts.

When you confessed your mistress, her red hair, her scars, how you learned them from up-close, from inside out, you were no longer the man I married but a dead deer in the center of our swimming pool.

Our dog has always considered you a burglar. Knew to spit, bark, bite before I did. Once while you were sleeping, I stitched her electric fence through your skin. I wear her shock collar on nights I go out drinking, on days I can’t find a reason to stay away even though you have left so many behind.

I’ve watched you with other women. The way you hand fruit to supermarket clerks, how your eyebrows lift at anyone with fake nails. Your favorite party story is how you once, publicly, pleasured a girl with your band mate’s drumstick. It’s no wonder we don’t love the same music.

On our first date, I bought a dress off a woman in Brooklyn so I could stay with you one more day. Last week I threw your clothes from our roof knowing they would have fallen faster had there been a body in them.

When I found a picture of your ex-lovers tits, used as a bookmark, I began opening every novel upside down like a teenager shaking birthday cards waiting for cash to fall out. This explains my love for fiction. We were never married. The dog is not ours.

While washing the dishes I watch from the window as the children we never had drown in the piss-filled pool. I’ve never tried to save them. I invented that pool, this sink.

Did you know that the metronome inside us quickens when telling a lie? I want to build an honest house, where the motion detector is so sharp it knows when my thoughts leave the room. Where the clap-on lamp works as a polygraph. When you swear you still love me, the lights flicker.

by Megan Falley

Ex-Boyfriends

They hang around, hitting on your friends or else you never hear from them again. They call when they're drunk, or finally get sober, they're passing through town and want dinner, they take your hand across the table, kiss you when you come back from the bathroom. They were your loves, your victims, your good dogs or bad boys, and they're over you now. One writes a book in which a woman who sounds suspiciously like you is the first to be sadistically dismembered by a serial killer. They're getting married and want you to be the first to know, or they've been fired and need a loan, their new girlfriend hates you, they say they don't miss you but show up in your dreams, calling to you from the shoeboxes where they're buried in rows in your basement. Some nights you find one floating into bed with you, propped on an elbow, giving you a look of fascination, a look that says I can't believe I've found you. It's the same way your current boyfriend gazed at you last night, before he pulled the plug on the tiny white lights above the bed, and moved against you in the dark broken occasionally by the faint restless arcs of headlights from the freeway's passing trucks, the big rigs that travel and travel, hauling their loads between cities, warehouses, following the familiar routes of their loneliness.

by Kim Addonizio