i. I don’t want to live under a makeshift roof. You’re August, and you killed summer in cold blood. You rose its dirty glass to clink, eating toast while I rotted under the misshapen shaft upstairs. You always want what you can’t have is what you’d say. The housetop has long been laced up by your dialogue, you speaking at the dinner table like your lips drip of holy prose instead of white wine. 

ii. I want to cover the hole above us. You brought winter, torrentially. It exiled us from the bed like two little kids with divorced parents: snowed in with nothing but a glance, and a loss of wisteria in our ashen chests. Subzero hurricanes ripped through the ceiling, chilling beneath our collarbones. We barely speak now. A mouth opening is a gasp for breath, followed by an outcast stare to watch our own breath waft in the misty cold. We’ve forgotten some native tongue we shared, with no more acts of service left under our belts. 

iii. I don’t want to live under this roof. How it heaves with every nightfall, how it cracks with every infidelity, or how the wood mosses over to hide the letters written by you. The neighbors know you by your name but not your wife. How is it that your wife is penciled into the walls, but the billet-doux is embedded between the barricades? It’s as if it’s all been here before I opened the first-floor door.

iv. I want to see what it all looks like from across the street. Alone, with a new warmth if the spring will say it so. A sweet morning that bleeds into something savory, but expected, and welcomed, and never sour or unforgiving. Wishes beat in my stomach like an unopened tomb, clawing through and hoping for a simmering season. I want more, and I want to know if that’s okay. There must be more than this.