In the last minute of our marriage we stood at
the sink, your back to me, listening to the water and
I understood, suddenly, that this was the last call—
If I speak, the program continues, if I stay quiet, then
the end— and I felt the muscle along my spine open
and close as if the body were still working on the problem
before the mind had any clauses, I am trying, now, to
see it as a series of calls, each instance of time a smaller
piece until you get to the irreducible, I rewind
the day you said you couldn’t love me back and
perhaps hadn’t ever fully, voice like a hand
pushing my chest back: earlier, the children,
if we’d had them, would have been on the floor
with their toys, a third thing binding us: earlier
than that, our first apartment, the carpet a
cheap gray, and us on our hands and knees
assembling the bed, my fingers holding the bolt
steady: then back even further to see if there was
a moment I could pull out, one board in the staircase that,
removed, would collapse the house before we moved in,
because when I thought you loved me I looked out
at the world as if from inside a profound dwelling,
every tree lit from the inside, each stranger’s face
a window with a lamp behind it, when I found
out you did not, or not in the way I had sworn
the house stayed standing but I was outside it,
looking in the blue lit windows from the dark, and—
— I want to be honest, I am loving you like a weapon
I had promised not to use, I laid next to you and
renewed my promise to keep you alive, to
not kill you with my hands
if your mind failed, but at night I stood in
the doorway of the bedroom to watch you
sleep, your face stripped down to nothing and
thought, if he wakes up and looks at me,
exactly now, I will stay, if he turns in his sleep
I will leave, as if the whole marriage could
balance on the hinge a sleeper rolling over but
that is how it felt, every day a test case, again
and again, changing one variable at a time: if
he trips on the step if he sits across from me
instead of beside if he catches what I
toss midair if he hears it as something
other than attack.
I built a scrapyard inside myself, each
harm a piece of rusting metal I could run
my hand along its sharpness, and still, I
was half on your side.
I do not want you
dead. I do not even
want you unhappy. I
only want the past
to stop replaying
itself with sharper
resolution each
year
Tyler Jagt is from Ontario, Canada and presently lives in Georgia. He teaches literature and critical writing at Mercer University.