It’s funny to want anything
when we should be focusing on the needing.

But I’ve wanted certain things so badly
that they’ve become needs,
become the things essential to my survival:

To be the ‘she’ in your poems,
the five-seven-five
rhythm in your haiku,
to go wherever it was that you went
when I had to snap my fingers in front
of your face and pull you back down to Earth.

I wanted the safe place between your arms,

wanted you to say my name like you were the first
person who figured out how to use language,
to get vocal chords to work and make sound.

I wanted to be made immortalized
in your eyes, written down in the margins
of that sun bleached journal you’d accidentally
left out in the rain that one time,

the one that now sprouts grass at its center.

Wanted, needed you to scribble my initials
and your initials everywhere—in trees
and dusty tabletops and the steamed
up mirror in the bathroom after a shower

after we washed the city off of our bodies,
after we scrubbed the moon and stars down the drain.

I used to be so selfish.

Couldn’t follow me without you
right up behind it, could never stop myself
from dialing your number when I knew you turned off your phone
so that I could hear you rasp your name
before the sound of the tone.

You’d call in the morning and ask if someone had died
and yes, of course, the answer was always yes,

but

I’d smile into the phone so brightly you’d swear you
were on the phone with the sun and I’d tell you no,
I never called you; my phone must be broken.

And it’s funny about
broken hearts and broken phones,
funny how we’ll walk around with them for years and years
in our pockets and purses,

making up excuses about how next year we’ll get
a replacement but we never do and we can’t bear to
send them in to get refurbished,

can’t bear to find that want by its roots and pull
for fear of what else might be hanging on.