What Chance Did We Ever Have?
Long title, short poem.
I Meant to Tell You I Forgot To Put The Leftover Chicken Back In The Fridge
But You Were Taking The Trash Out,
So I Held the Silence in My Mouth Until It Dissolved,
and Then It Was Too Late, So I Got Into Bed
and Hoped You Would Sleep In The Spare Room
And Prayed The Cat Wouldn’t Choke On A Bone
In the evening
she sets the air conditioning to seventy.
I can’t sleep
when it’s over sixty-seven.
What chance did we ever have?
It’s wild how a whole relationship can hide inside small domestic moments - the fridge, the AC setting, the silence between two sentences.
This poem proves it’s never the big things that break us, but the tiny ones we don’t speak out loud.
-Double ID
Hopefully first this time 🥂
Ahh, the disagreements that bind us. The long title convention reminds me of Ted Hughes, who also tended to merge titles into the content of his poems. It's cleverly done here.