had no exit row.

Found sixty-four lucky pennies

in the five months after you met,

wrapped them for her birthday in fabric

you cut from the sleeve of your only warm jacket,

learned to play the ukulele

just so you write her songs,

tattooed her halos on your arms

and left a space for all

you’d both do wrong.

You sneeze poetry, you said to her.

You could win the Nobel Prize

just from getting the flu.

What if what you saw then was the truth? My therapist asks.

Your holiest self seeing someone else’s holiest self? What if

what came after was the lie? What if the disco ball never stopped

sparkling, something just closed your eyes? Your past, maybe?

The terror you carry inside? The not enough or too much

that raised you to do everything you could to ensure

you’d be hurt more than you’d be loved.

* * *

We were in our kitchen in New Orleans.

It was morning and I was sitting at the table

her grandfather had given her grandmother

as a wedding gift when she told me where her lips

had been the night before. I walked into our bedroom,

picked up the sixty-four pennies and threw them

out the door. She dove to the ground, crawled

on her knees, counting the pennies one by one

into her hands, saying my name over and over,

both of our lips buried in tears.

When we officially broke up, I was so certain I had nothing

left to lose I went to an open mic for the first time and read

a love poem I wrote for her before we said goodbye.

I was shaking so much my voice could not be heard

over the paper rattling in my hands, but I knew

wherever she was in the world that night

the poem found her ears.

That was twenty years ago.

Twenty years I’ve been writing love poems.

Last night I was at her house holding her son who calls me Ankle

because it’s a mix between aunt and uncle, and I was thinking

how the straight folks in my life don’t always understand

why so many of my exes are my closest friends

but how my therapist says it’s the most beautiful

part of the queer community—how we’ve all lost so much family

when we find people we call family, we’ll do almost

anything to not say goodbye.

And because I didn’t say goodbye, she was there

when I met the woman dressed in glow-in-the-dark stars,

and the woman with the checkerboard countertops,

and the woman who rescued me from balloons,

and the woman whose halos I tattooed,

and the woman who ate ice cream with her hands

and I didn’t call it a flaw. I called it a quirk,

and my god—I know that makes it sound like I got around.

(Let me say for the record I wish I got around.)

But I didn’t. I’m just old and I wrote it all down.