"Tell Me What You Want From Me"
       

I told him. An apartment with no doors
and crown molding where I'd teach him
how to be alone. Third and King, masked
and bare, beloved and yet left by himself
with the uncovered furniture and the fire.
A loosening finger, a snap-case
of yellowed pages and him,
                                    when I wanted him
(Apollonian, twenty-five), his head lolled back
against the sheets we wouldn't clean. We'd ash
on the floor. I could want while I still had
what I wanted: no novelty, just flush-
ruined, him pleading like a child. In the caverns
beneath, I would enter an alcove and there
my tabernacle. Tea brewed from the ash
of letters sent by other swains, swan-necked
photos (me alone in the garden). My shadow
pinned down and stitched again to my feet.

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Copyright © 2019 Brittany Cavallaro All rights reserved
from Unhistorical
University of Akron Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission