Published in The Stockholm Review
I built you out of screws and duct tape,
tore skin from myself and covered your cogs
to make you look human. I painted your eyes blue –
nearly the exact shade as his, but I couldn’t
find the right colour of the sea. I stitched clothing piece by piece
from things I’d been unable to throw out, charred plaid, now-black
blue jeans, a hoodie that had become a sweatshirt. I told you our story,
our private jokes, how you like your tea in the morning, that
you never drink it past four pm. I tried to show you how
he made his scrambled eggs, but I never had the knack. (We don’t eat
scrambled eggs anymore.) I told you how to hold me
when we slept –
but your arm was too heavy, full of sand and
full of metal. Now you sleep on your back as
you power off, sometimes with my hand holding yours,
often not. I tried to teach you his laugh, one
of his many laughs, but you couldn’t even
get his chuckle right. I pressed you into his mould,
tucking in bones and shoulders and re-sizing fingers,
pretending the mis-matched shapes were simply
the tears in my eyes.
rosiegailor 