Checking Up on My Ex-Girlfriend’s Shit (A Poem in 3 Parts) by R. Jones
CW: drug use, drinking
I.
I storm my ex-girlfriend’s Twitter ‘Likes’
like the beaches of
Normandy or—
more appropriately—
I storm them like I’ve stormed every other
ex-girlfriend’s Twitter ‘Likes’
after she broke up with me because
I won’t stop
doing shit like this
every time I get my hands on
more than 1/3 of a glass of
boxed wine
& a bad mood.
There’s something about the
sallow glow of my iPhone in
this too-dark too-hot
smelling
like
godawful shit
apartment
& the way it shows me all the things
that are making her laugh these days
that flushes ugliness from my head—
& something about still
being a part of her brain’s dim warehouse
so long after she changed the locks
(& called the cops)
that keeps me here, in my chair,
restless & pantsless,
long after the Ambien has started to make everything
curl & roam free on black stepladders of velvet night air.
I should open a window.
I should open several windows.
II.
When
the
FUCK
did
she
start
following
Zac
FUCKING
EFRON—
again?
III.
I lived
in a dorm with a man named Ronnie
when I went to State
to major in Psychology &
she has liked Ronnie’s tweet about
Trump
or some shit from
two days back
& so I
leave my darkness to enter
night darkness to walk to
car darkness &
with Ambien as my iris I
move to seek answers
to which I no longer belong.
R. Jones is a writer based in the northeast. Read more of his work in Hobart Pulp, the Expat Literary Journal, Misery Tourism, and more. Shout at him on Twitter at @jonestown00.