What I Never Wrote

rachelmckibbens:

was how you begged me to keep it.

But you were never home, and I was

but did not want to be. And by then

you had become a man smaller than a man.

So I wished it away. Closed my eyes one night

and dreamt it out of me. The next morning

you banged on the bathroom door,

then charged in. I pointed into the tub.

I said, Look at that. 

And you asked, Is that—
And I said, Yes.

And you said, Oh,

and then you shaved off your beard.

 

- Rachel McKibbens, 2007 (poem rejected by editor for Pink Elephant)