Exit Strategy

Pretending we weren't waiting for something—a sign in the city or stars

Today’s Change of Heart: a breakup poem from approximately a thousand years ago (i.e. 2019ish?).

---

EXIT STRATEGY

You left the glass bottle
Coke on the sidewalk, said
you were ready to go. Half-
drunk, half-grown, pretending

we weren't waiting for something—
a sign in the city or stars.
But the constellations were constant
as we plied ourselves beneath them,

kept on coming back:
gluttons for gutting ourselves,
for anything. Five years
and a lifetime later,

I feel nothing, feel my feeling nothing
like a pillow pressed on my face.
Like maybe I'm already gone.
Like maybe I was wrong

that time, not so long ago,
sitting at your turn, blinker
blinking your direction. How I spun
the other way instead.