They won’t stop calling to say they love me,
though we’ve been broken up for eight strange years.
The hope of Boston spring has unscrewed something
once solid inside them and replaced it with a raving
flower. How do you say, are you taking your meds
in the kindest way to someone whose voice
you haven’t heard in half-a-decade. A once atheist
says they believe in a higher power now, they keep
seeing people who look like me, the new blooms
and sidewalks full of little me’s running around—
I have been the Mad Hatter and I have been Alice
in a different life, but in this one I have a kitchen
that’s big enough for two people, a home office
of my own, three bottles of pills I take religiously
to stay neatly glued together, so that my seams
and cracks don’t show to the world. I have spent
years curating the right image: an Ann Taylor dress
and Naturalizer pumps, a cluttered bathroom counter
full of Lancome and Clinique, no blue and pink
in my hair anymore. I am the image of a woman
with a jetted tub these days. And their messages
call back the old self, the self I tried to bury
in Charleston where my chaos life grew
its own inertia, became a wrecking force
I couldn’t live with anymore.
