Microagression

I froze when the waitress asked “together or separate.”

Because here we were not just with your coworkers

but your employees.

And it took me back to Northern Michigan.

To a blue collar bar with wood paneling,

ancient crackling neon sign for Pabst Blue Ribbon

before the hipsters claimed it.

The bar was

haunted by spirits

Wrong Way

Today I turned the wrong way and ended up in your neighborhood.

I felt the a cold, pointed apprehension prick under my scalp. Awoke from the shock when the driver beside me laid in to his horn. It took a bit to shake of this feeling, like physical pain.

And I wondered why it haunts me, still. We dated a few months my senior year, a fall romance turned damp and listless in the spring.

Now I haven't seen you in 4 months. We've been strangers almost as long as we were lovers.

Yet you haunt me, still. This pain like an ice pick behind my eye. Except lobotomies are for forgetting. This is the pain of the body remembering. I'm not sure how you ended up in my limbic system, coiled in my lizard brain.

I want to shout, see? If you'd only waited we could have had everything we planned. Now I stand here, the fool in the rain proving a point to no one as I live our life myself.