I scrounge for change at the bottom of my purse
You scrounge for change in your pockets
We search the streets of the lower east side for food at 1 a.m.
One plate of vegetarian curry
One fork
We stand at your kitchen table (because you have no chairs)
And feed each other (you’ve expressed your concern that I do not eat enough)
I look around your east village walk-up
You have one couch
One bookcase covered wall
One big bed (I like that best)
Your living room curtains are torn
There’s cake icing stuck to the wall, petrified for years
You’ve refused to clean it (I don’t ask why)
I imagine a heated fight
Someone’s temper
A jealous lover
This turns me on
A random observation: your bathroom door doesn’t shut properly
There’s a rabbit, there’s a dog
There’s you & me in the moonlight
Pouring over each other all night like a rain that might come
I count the rings on the ceiling while you sleep
I count remote incandescent figures in the sky
I don’t find us starring in constellations
I find us at the bottom of an endless dream
Future, hopeless
I reflect on a conversation I had with S & P
I had given them heaps of expensive clothing from my past life
Rich with the Rivieras of France and Italy
S said she’d gladly stay in a loveless and abusive marriage for all that
I say she’s crazy
P is oblivious as if she’d given up
I’d given up once, too
But sometimes you must give in
(It’s not always about you)
And harvest the benefits gifted in all your lover’s glory
Until you take him in your arms
Until you are ready to lose him

JENNIFER JUNEAU is the author of the novel UberChef USA (Spork Press) and the full-length poetry collection More Than Moon (forthcoming by Is A Rose Press.)  A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee for fiction, she lives and writes in Brooklyn.