we decide to end things; it’s been a summer

and his mother’s art collection hangs in the living room. She’s leaning over the staircase and taking swings at the chandelier, her arms covered in bracelets, a diamond ring I’ve often thought about stealing, he tells me to ignore her and come outside already. You’re out there, too, by the fire, drinking and melting beer bottle caps in a multi-foot tall fire. This is what I’ll miss the most: softness of deep summer nights, cloudless and the stars are bright, buzzed and we’re tripping across the street to the farm, kissing between cornstalks and cauliflower, he jokes about lighters and branches, you won’t take my hand even when no one is looking, you pick fights with me until I become exhausted, I give up after you leave, I look for your pockmarked red car everywhere. You disappeared into a July, you took my apologies and your sweatshirt with the holes in the sleeves, I should have kept your cigarettes, maybe the blanket your grandmother knit, I have one photo proving all this was real, of you, wine glass in hand, laughing at a joke I can’t remember. The next photo is of me, eating a gummy worm, I won’t meet anyone’s eyes, what an exhausting resilience I was coating myself in, what a month of sleepless days, what of it, what day is it anyway, and what’s with this love I can’t let go of well-water whiskey and the neighborhood cat, river moss and cicada season for the first time in my life, I’m mistaking frogs for toads, I’m losing my ability to be honest, I tell everyone at school you don’t exist, pretend I’m healed, I hang out the window and catcall strangers in the alleyway. New York City knows how to take care of me, I eat greasy bagel sandwiches from the 24-hour deli, I play games with bodega cats,

bringing them acorns from home, I delete your number from my phone, I decay in the museum and my lungs turn into water-logged oysters, I don’t know anymore where you wake up, skinny dipping with my exes again, we get drunk and leave the boat in the middle of the lake, I come home with someone else’s shoes in my hands, an ache at the back of my chest, they’ve dimmed the violet light in the foyer and all the paint peels off the walls.

Sam Moe is the first-place winner of Invisible City’s Blurred Genres contest in 2022, and the 2021 recipient of an Author Fellowship from Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. Her first chapbook, “Heart Weeds,” is out from Alien Buddha Press and her second chapbook, “Grief Birds,” is forthcoming from Bullshit Lit in April 2023. You can find her on Twitter and Instagram as @SamAnneMoe.