Spilled Milk

The man she loves has an aversion to used dental floss. Hates wet white piles with stuck on food bits hidden in the shower with no tub or on the sink with no soap—

talks about it in a blue bed of fluff and fuck and failure. The man she loves talks at six a.m. for three loud minutes before work, plucks shirt pants tie from hanger socks from floor, does not take out the trash on purpose, leaves two bags of it next to the woman he loves. The man she loves has a green cloth case over a brick pillow his mother gave him. The man she loves slams doors and deodorant, brushes his teeth—

a jackhammer in the bathroom next to the blue bed of fluff and fuck and failure. The woman he loves swirls two fingertips along the curled high metal headboard for three hours nights until sleep comes in spurts. The woman he loves says it is just so cold for her here inside, she can see her breath in puffs of white with violent icicles. The woman he loves blames it all on the green brick pillow and the mother and the bed of fluff and fuck and failure.

The man she loves and the woman he loves bought this two story burden made bad blood and wreckage bits of food everywhere the man she loves steps. The burden falls apart, sheet rock cracks, water heater implodes, the toaster burns black the food that they cook from the freezer, smells like rotten meat and cheap popsicles inside the bedroom. The woman he loves wants to shear the overgrown hair from her head with meat scissors and pluck out her own eye to look back at herself frown in a stained corner next to twin garbage bags.

The man she loves wants to smother the woman he loves with the green brick pillow his mother gave him and needs her to stop crying over spilled milk and seventeen pints of blood and placenta. Just clean it up. Her mouth smells like rotten meat and cheap popsicles and that two story burden and deer blood dear blood and slow death—
not the man she loves' semen—

where is that green brick pillow? Jackhammer toothbrush and piles of floss hidden beneath the woman he loves pulls a long thin white string out of her insides the piles keep getting bigger and bigger flanked with food bits and baby bits and glitter and sheetrock cheerleader splits he calls dry wall.