Things I Learned in the Night

by Emily Byrnes

He tells me he will hibernate like the wood toads and the bees and will not wake up until we’re together again. I go back to school and wonder if he dreams of me the way I dream of him.

She’s just a friend you said so I invited her in and offered her my coffee, my friendship, and my couch but then she took you right out from under me and now she lives in the house I used to call home and sleeps with the man I used to call my own like a cuckoo who lays its eggs in another bird’s nest and watches as it single-handedly destroys a family and justifies it with instinct.