Poems About Love

I woke before you and did nothing about it. The radiator ticked. Your shoulder rose and fell.

There's a word for the way your coffee cup still sits on the second shelf where no one else would put it—

Being in love is the thing that comes after the fireworks—the quiet drive home with the windows down and someone's hand on your knee.

My grandmother's hands were a map of everywhere she'd been.

There is a jacket on my chair that doesn't belong to me, and this is how you know

We shared a room for sixteen years and I still don't know your favorite color.

She does this thing with bobby pins— holds three between her lips like small dark fish

I've started keeping Saturdays the way some people keep a journal— every detail logged,

He's not the one she imagined. She imagined someone with a plan.

I'm not going to be cool about this. I've tried.

Marriage is a long argument about the thermostat.

My grandmother's kitchen smelled like a country that no longer exists.

The roses I remember most are the ones you didn't send.

We don't say I love you anymore. We say: your phone is at eleven percent. We say: I picked up the thing

Other men describe their wives like cars they've owned too long. I refuse.

You didn't bring flowers. You brought takeout and the correct opinion about the show I was watching.

I didn't marry the woman I fell in love with. I married the one who showed up after.

I write you letters in my head on the bus, in the shower, in the three seconds

It's not the grand gestures. It's not the airport sprint, the boom box on the lawn.

He doesn't know I keep a list. Not on paper—in the body, in the part that doesn't forget.

I mean the way he folds the map even though the phone knows where we are. I mean the scar above his eyebrow

This morning you stood at the mirror and cursed your hair with a creativity

My hands still set the table for two. Not every night—just Thursdays, when my hands forget

The moon has heard every confession ever whispered from a bedroom window.

When you stand in front of everyone you know and a few people you don't.