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I am willing to
forget. There is no point
in wishing for an alternate
reality. Yet I am always
hungry: if only I could eat
back the words that spilled
out like peppers last night, glistening
with the oily sheen of meditated
resentment. I was almost proud

of these blood jewels, that I
could have yielded them up
so easily from the depths
of my belly. I did not mean to hurt
you. Only perhaps to shock you
with their bite. I thought myself
honest: this is what we’ll have
to make our stew. They will add
flavor, nuance. You thought me
a stranger. Why didn’t you tell me
you were thinking of trying
once more? I would have devoured
everything myself, for you.

Last week, I’d wondered:
what is the opposite
of a ghost? Rather than memories
of a past you, your potential
presence surrounded me, spectral.
A window across East River.
It was still a negative
space, but a different sort,
charged with latent
possibility. I’d wanted to call it
antimatter, though that was not quite
right. I marinated my mind
in music: your Spotify playlist
I christened antighost.
Although now I wonder

if antimatter would have been more
appropriate. Antimatter
and matter are nearly
identical, except
they carry opposing
charge and spin. Am I your antimatter,
or are you the antimatter
of the memory I have of you?
I am no scientist,
but they say that the two
ought not to meet. If they do
they collapse
into pure energy—it is a
mutual annihilation.

(A few days ago I tried to meet
somebody else. He wasn’t
you. We forked up Jewish BBQ
and attempted banter. At one point
we began to talk about
awe, and he reminded me
that we are seeing illusions
of ourselves, that everything solid
is mostly empty space,
not even air. Compressed, we would be
grains of salt. As we are today,
we are all dispersed vacuums
bumping in a void.)

I once chastised you that
suffering does not make saints,
yet here I am, fetishizing
pain, whisking it into
some grand epic, in order to
make some meaning.
I mean to write
stories, sampling skins beyond
my own, yet see how
I can write only disjointed
lines, immortalizing you.

Though I digress:
what of the peppers,
heat coughed up
despite history?

This morning I awoke
bleary, with crusts in my eyes,
glancing to see what
remained. Everything red had
shriveled up, blackened
by my bedside, and
I could not remember
why they were said.