There are only four hundred wild elephants left in Africa.

When I told the drunk lover this last night; he change the subject because what does love and elephants have in common really. When I told him nothing that I was just laying in bed listening to the BBC, he broke down in tears started singing the Townes Van Sant song that was the first he ever sang to me.

Hearing someone cry over the phone is so odd. There is about absolutely nothing you can do about it.

He wants to come back. It shouldn't be so easy to say no.

Left

Last night for the third time I sent my lover away on the Greyhound (or the Dog as he calls it). This is how we live. This is how we cope. An endless circle of love and confusion. He went to Lexington this time.

Edna at Walgreens said to me this morning, really at noon, when I stopped in for some things, minus the pack of smokes since I am 6 days smoke-free now, that I hate the fact that he loves me so much. In part true. But what I really hate in the bottle he keeps with him. The bottle he gives all his suffering to when he should be giving those things to me. Maybe he knows it would be too much. What is that line from Simic I love? I'll have to look it up. It fits this moment.

I leave for AWP on Wednesday. I'm ready to get away for a while. It will be good to be with my friends from school for a few days.

Once, we were small holes underneath our mothers' hearts

[Once, we were small holes underneath our mothers’ hearts] as they laid quietly and waited for the not-so familiar shape of a man to sweep them away to that part of the river where water could mixed with soil to form mud that would become the odds of ourselves.

The first time I saw you, was at the coffee shop next to the bobcat’s cage in Riverside Park. I can still see you holding the volume of Lacan in your left hand while you tapped out the bass line, on the top of the Formica table, to the background music with the right, the cold strangeness in your lips, the way your eyes shifted back and forth across the page—

My mother never wanted a child who, like water, could tear down walls with such ease. Your mother only remembered your presence when the wind blew soft by her frame.

Once, I could watch you hold your head in your arms when something would strike you as funny—when we both smiled easily over things so simple as the cardinal flying, a small blonde girl struggling to hold onto a balloon that the wind also wanted, the stories I could never finish.

I knew that I would find you here standing on the bank’s edge.

Now, I wait for the orchestra of stars and waves to launch under this creation and this conclusion at the foot of the water next to you but the wind refuses to help the song’s harmony.

So, I will stand perfectly silent and when the globe decrescendos I will push my fingers deep down into the dirt and scoop enough to close the small spot underneath my heart that has been left open as you jump and swim away to the other side.