"My Heart Answers" and "Tuesday at the Diner, When I Almost Lost My Name"

My Heart Answers

Listen: it wasn’t real—I know that.
But the light in the dream
was this invented gold,
the kind you get in paintings
of saints or memory.
We were older, but the same.
No greetings, no how have you been?
Just that look—your hair catching fire in the light,
your body both 39 and 19,
and still unfinished.
 
We were in a cathedral. Or a museum
shaped like one. Arches blooming upward,
sweeping like the decades.
In college, you said architecture was proof
that humans wanted gods,
even if they didn’t want God.
You said belief was just hunger
that had learned to stand upright.
 
We didn’t pray.
But we knelt
in so many rooms,
in so many versions
of what we thought
touch could mean.
 
Twenty years ago,
a mattress on the floor,
reading Rilke as an instruction manual,
your fingers drawing lines
down the inside of my arm
like you were trying
to learn me by heart.
 
You cooked on your hotplate
and played me songs
that made you close your eyes.
 
You said I was your second love,
said the first one didn’t count.
Said I’d be the one you wrote poems about
when we were old and full of regret.

Tuesday at the Diner, When I Almost Lost My Name

I’d follow you anywhere, I thought—
so we met
at a sports bar off Halsted,
the corner of brick and barlight.
 
I wondered why
we never went to your place.
I wondered what I already knew
and kept smoothing over
like a wrinkle in my best blue dress.
 
The walls were a memory of white.
The waitress almost smiled.
Ten TVs broadcast the game
with the sound off—
men running bases in silence.
 
You almost touched my hand—
not to hold it,
but to ask what I wanted to eat.
 
Eat?
My heart was a band of kids
racing down the street with a bunch of balloons,
streaming after you.
 
I ordered the soup
to prove I still existed. 
 
The waitress said they only had gazpacho
and didn’t seem to think
that was unusual.
 
I nodded,
but I was thinking
of all the people
who had sat in that seat before me—
what they knew,
and when.
 
I tried to ask you about them—
how many, how often,
when does a seat forget—
but you, my boyfriend, my almost,
thought I was asking
a solvable question.
 
You started doing the math:
200 people a day,
more on weekends,
ten years open—
numbers stacking, unstitching the room.
 
But my heart didn’t want numbers
and you were stalling, too.
The numbers
were a doorway
into the thing
you really came to say.
 
With one eye on the game,
you said my name.
softly at first.
and then you repeated it,
over and over,
shaking it in your mouth.
 
How close I came, then,
to letting the moment
decide me—
 
how close I came to becoming
whatever you needed
to leave behind.
 
But something held:
just a thin, stubborn thread—
a refusal
to vanish
because of a boyfriend who was really
just cold soup.
 
I took back my name
and kept walking—
past the brick,
past the bars,
toward a version of myself
that could hunger for more.