I would like to tell you how our friendship lost its appeal.

It was simple and petty, and was about the circumstances of power
and white feminism and how it simpers.

I saw how my symbol was porous in your pupil-eye
and I was your middle-class servant,

not real to you. You spoke ill of me.

It was shared with me and I fell sullen suddenly and bore my anger
till it fell into place with the categories I had for it.

I realized I was a kind of curtain to envisage with a sparing light
that shouldn’t get in the way.

I was an outdated venetian blind with a cuckold cord
and not a longstanding mirror.

And I stopped believing your bright-eyed condemnation
of everyone across the widened and bolted table.

People who were decidedly likeable. I knew they were.

There’s a row of furniture that we all have to muscle,
and it hurts our arms and we are bruised now.

And without you we made dinner—with lobster bisque and strident
chalices itemizing kindly suggestions with holidays underneath the
sentiment;
and it was overwhelmingly delightful.

And with this, we realize that arms give up holding the prideful
and turn to those with a bona fide devotion of humans.

Most of us are together in this project of leaving ambition
to some delightful happenstance and not construing people as prey.

But now I am the one who sounds superior. I want to retract some of this tone.

But I can’t, I will say more to how I placed your authority above my
head—a headless crown.

You find it necessary to reprove innocence
and I saw that squarely replace your radiance.

A poem, while it can expose us to our imagining selves, can also trick us
into imagining ourselves
as something beyond our behaviors.

It’s this crime of the shameful self, who is willing to feel this truth
with the same frequency as the other feelings.

You live behind a tree and the tree’s soil is only grounding the said tree.