And your husband will smash your face open against a wardrobe but I still loved you, only the moon more dormant (p. 3)

And your husband will smash your face open against a wardrobe but I still loved you, only the moon more dormant
Chris Scott

The future will be
how our kneecaps throb and pull
in a moving vehicle when we’re escaping
the deftly crumbling infrastructure
of a traumatized eastern seaboard,
trying to dissuade the shift
of interlocking limbs
from distracting the night sadistic

When you gaze like an impaled
wingspan stretched across the stomach
of a growling minivan I come alive
like the way we fill the air
between towns and cities with x-rays
and waves bent with anchormen
grinning on cue

And you,
at the foot of the bed when he’s crying
and bouncing your children on his lap
saying he still needs you, when
he’s driving you to the hospital and
he becomes your hero because there
were other weapons in the house
he could’ve used

I’ll ape ventriloquist blue from
the top floor of a brownstone, wrapping
canvas around my fists and packing my
things again like the past
won’t be our palms scraped from misjudged
footing and an awkward fall, and your
face as I still remember it are postcards collected
in a shoebox when it hasn’t rained in years
and we didn’t know better