& I knew her by the rose in her hair

The neighbor's cat knew it was black.
It would wait until it heard crunch of Mom's Altima over the alley's stones
to run straight across the road into the rose bushes growing up the shed that I always thought belonged to the lady
I could never build enough of a pitch to sell Girl Scout cookies to.
So Mom would "damnit", sniff a bit, back up to into the street. and go around the block instead.
This made sense to me then.

And it's this scratchy memory that tickles my throat like the symptom of a cold I can't sleep off when I read those lines by Capote
that say you don't really see the room
you're standing in until you know a visitor is coming.

Is that why didn't I see the bruise pretending to be that hazel you're so proud to call your eye color on your driver's license. Remember when you showed it to me like some sort of proof of your beauty and I couldn't say anything except
that my eyes are brown and it says so on my license too, like you didn't know.

Remember when I found out through a flick of a hand that he swung his fist into your ear, into under your hair where you could bleed
hard raspberry down your cheeks, like the syrup you'd put on your pancakes when I could convince you to get up early enough. But I liked the apricot syrup so if someone wanted to make me bleed we'd have to pick
something else I like that’s red, which could be strawberries I guess, but they're really similar and you’d probably think that’s a cop out which maybe it is. Did you know that there's a berry called a cloudberry? That’s something I want to remember to tell you.

But tell me now, did that make sense to you then.
That you could only cover so much of your face with your hands. They're so small, you always told me.
But is that when you realized it, when you compared them to all the breakable parts of your face?

When I found out, through some worm of gossip that I denied,
I wanted to say that's a lie, that no, you were always okay.
And I couldn’t help but hear myself thinking.
'but doesn't that sound like something she would say?'

So when you recite those lines you like to read aloud to me like,
“Our hearts are like tipped wineglasses”
I breathe clouds against the windowpane you installed between us because I know that you weren't always laying here talking to me with such a precise articulation, were you?