poem: Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz

Starter Marriage

With love, there is the bright, white, flashbulb moment,

sealed with a kiss, of course, and that marks the slick second

in which a marriage begins. But, friend, you and I have been

tied to each other hips for years without cake, or bouquet,

and definitely no kiss. Friendship, a high school pal once said,

is a ship big enough for one, and I remember tapping his cheek

with my fingers. Oh, you’re such a misanthrope, I sighed,

sending up my S.A.T. word like a victory flag. But years later,

you make me think of it, the salted wood and pilled sails,

this ship in which I think you sit, while I’m in the water,

pushing. In so many ways, I have felt married to you, felt lucky

to hold course through the choppy waters of your temper,

waited patiently as you visited all those girl-shaped islands

you’d later call mistakes, lashed myself to your hull when

all common sense screamed mutiny. Ours is a burnished

friendship, an earned one, and I have felt proud to know

every one of your sailor’s knots and how to untie them.

But friend, you are no lover; you are no husband. You

sit on the meaty side of heart, and still claim hunger.

Drag me up and down the scales of your anger, and still claim

alone. You pin it to me on the sidewalk, a spitty Fuck you,

and still walk away like you know I’ll still follow. It’s hard

to know where this is going or maybe how it is going to end.

Friend, please know you are my most exhausted ardor,

my most tested faith, that you taught me what I’d want

to have in a partner by not being it. That when love sat

down across from me in a diner, followed me home

with a soft knapsack of a mouth, utterly emptied

of sharp words, I wept at how easy it all was. Still, friend,

I know that you were here first, that we are something

worth fighting for, but, please listen when I tell you

I’m not sure how long I can keep fighting you

in order to save us.

CRISTIN O’KEEFE APTOWICZ is the current ArtsEdge Writer-in-Resident at the University of Pennsylvania. She has been published or is forthcoming in McSweeney’s Internet Tendancies, Rattle, Conduit, La Petite Zine, Pank, Barrelhouse, Monkeybicycle, decomP, Umbrella, and The Other Journal, among others. Her non-fiction book, Words in Your Face: A Guided Tour Through Twenty Years of the New York City Poetry Slam, was published by Soft Skull Press in 2008. Her latest collection of poetry, Everything is Everything, was published by Write Bloody Publishing in January 2010. For more information, please visit her website at www.aptowicz.com.