Apology to the Broken Light Bulb
after Christie Ann Reynolds
The thing you don’t get is that I’ve never had the
chance to do all that kitschy New England shit
you used to do with all your exes once you admitted
to yourself that there was no substance in the red schnapps
he used to pour into water bottles and carry in his back pocket.
There are cities we’ve never seen and we promised
each other that’d we fight over frog legs in Baton Rogue,
that you’d smack me in the middle of Piazza San Marco
after a pigeon had crapped in your gelato.
I deserve to be there when you remember that
it was my fault about the silverware, that when
we got home and I saw the empty spaces in the
drawers, I was already kneeling over your feet,
ready to lick the mud off your ballerina shoes if it’d
meant you’d look me in the eye again.
I’m still going to be there, though,
when you drag him through the door by his shirt collar
and turn the lights on, because once he tries to
tell you about the people neither of us
could care any less about and kisses you, purrs like
a cat when he sees the tower of books you promised
that you’d never read, you’re going to burst
into a million hot pieces of chalky white glass, and
someone’s going to have to be there to pick up the pieces.
Mark Cugini smokes with a lot of college students. A founding editor of Big Lucks, his work has appeared in Melville House, Everyday Genius, NOÖ, and Petrichor Machine, among others. He curates the Three Tents Reading Series in Washington D.C, and is a regular contributor to HTMLGiant.
