You sure have slept with a lot of husbands
to never be anyone’s wife
and at first this loneliness feels something like karma.
The wedding dream once dense as a tower of cake
stacked 4 tiers high and iced with buttercream is suddenly cultured down into a hard, sharp sliver on the tongue.
You can remember how the dream still loomed
that time you binge watched “Say Yes to the Dress”
with your ex-boyfriend
while he grinded his teeth and asked to borrow money.
And it was still there on your 31st birthday when nothing
at all exceptional happened.
No one sending flowers to your cubicle for the
office ladies to coo over.
No one else as excited about this day as you.
You know it lingered at Christmas last year when,
alone and drunk on spiked cider,
you locked yourself in the bathroom clutching an
arrangement of makeup brushes
and pink daisy razors,
a toilet paper train tucked into your pantyhose
while you wept thru three tubes of the good mascara.
But then,
you woke up one day as though the first day of some 5th season
starfished in the middle of your queen-size bed
and rolled around in the consideration that you owe
to absolutely no one
on whether or not to get up and do the dishes or spend half
the day in bed browsing the Ikea catalog for a duvet cover
for which only your opinion matters before getting up and knowing that there are takeout leftovers
from the night before
that no one else has eaten
or taking a shower knowing all of the hot water
is yours for the taking and it all feels like some kind of great love story;
You + last night’s Lo Mein
You + an obscenely floral duvet
You + all of this lavish space
You + all of this delicious silence
You + this in-ground pool
of non-obligation to anyone at all.