Couplet Poetry

When your wife asks if you want another child, tell her that the sun’s core is nuclear fusion that will one day consume the Earth, that the corner cemetery is wet and full of quiet bodies. There are guns on the news today—a grocery and a synagogue, and a school is no place for children anymore. Your son has a husky wail that cuts through the night.

I’m not thinking about those movie scientists reinventing the dinosaur over and over. A baby is not a thunder lizard, not a tangle of scales and teeth out for an easy meal, but two babies are a swarm of fingernails and hunger for love in the darkest heart of the night. Two babies arrive in the hospital room, with an announcement of everything we’ve been feeling these past few months, love starved and panicked for extinction. Extinction in fancy restaurants, in school parking lots, by the Chinese place in the mall food court—everywhere at once empty of bodies.

I leave museums too fast like the men in the morning— no coffee, maybe a kiss on the cheek, sometimes I’ll call you. I stroll by Michelangelo paintings, some da Vinci, whole rooms of Botticelli. Still, there is no limit to my dissatisfaction with the world. Nothing feels right, throat burning. I want to go home. I text the man I’ve been fucking. I want to love him but he probably won’t let me. I leave Italy in a month.

The summer I moved to New York was the summer of BV: bacterial vaginosis. I wanted to blame the subway platform heat. Or the new silk underwear I bought to feel like Carrie Bradshaw, my true Sex and the City moment, and here was BV, stinky BV, me and BV at my fourth visit to the health center already. I want to blame a dick. But I don’t know whose to blame. I could blame my pussy, her distorted rainbow of brown, deeper brown, pink, red, and purple.