Venus Retrograde

I come with anniversaries collected
like medals, collecting like dust.


I come cracked open and ready to eat,
yolk leaking from heart centre.


I come sticky and feral
in July sheets and twenty-threes,
in train strikes and ten-dollar fortunes.


I come bearing gifts: fluorescent
bodega nights, watching the air swell
and contract in that never-again sort of way.


I come undone on bathroom walls,
latrinalia, cheek to tile, memory
blackout drunk in the moonlight.


I come shrink-wrapped once again,
hollowed like honeydew, dried and
desiccated and hardening at the edges.


I blink and I miss it.
I blink and it never even happened at all.