Jill Alexander Essbaum

Dear BLANK.

I shall be brief, but frank,

Terse if not curt, aloof, though unswerving—

What little we had amounted to nothing.

It's a furnace of the first place, fever of mine.

The mattress can't be trusted. I suture shut my eyelids.

I align my terrors to their predetermined brinks.

But the bed that is my boat, slopes lee side,

Then sinks.

Then Winter.

Then Spring.

Then came those seasons

That splinter from the seasons.

Then came the ring

That I wore without good reason.

That was the year I thought

I was going insane. Help, I said plainly.

I am having a mild case of the heartbreak.

When I looked at the fissure, all was glass and mistaken.

O holy terror of a night, this mad,

  malicious night, a supine night, bright

as bile, but anyway, inauspicious.

  Bedraggled night, delicious as doom.

A night over which no angel will swoon.

  O moon, O eye of God, unblinking.

And, yes, I have been drinking.

Sometimes you feel you've a touch of the broken heart,

when the orchid of evening wilts into nighttime,

when the darkness is not yet deep.

When you are tipsy with the grief of his leaving…