What is your damage?, he said,
but the way he spat it out told me
that he didn’t really want to know —
not there in the Grand Rapids airport
(do I remember right that it was named
for Gerald Ford?) while we ate hot dogs
and waited for our flight home. Home.
Now, there’s a word for you. What a joke.
Maybe my damage was all the time spent
assuaging him, his ego, assuring him
that he was smarter than me, that I was
lucky to be with him, even when he was
surly as any god who is distant more so
than loving. But I didn’t answer that day.
I never did answer, really — I just left
when he told me to leave. I even left
our cats to fend for themselves with him.
But that day, like I said, I didn’t say
much of anything until we got on the
plane and we both made small talk
with the other person in our row. He
was good at that. You’d never know
we were fighting, every day a little
more damage, and that a moment before
we got on the plane, I’d flicked
a piece of onion off the table,
wadded up my napkin, and cried.

We took all the saucepans down,
the pots she hung from a metal grid
in the style of an ’80s movie or
a spread from a magazine,
like the ones she would buy
at the grocery store and then
try to fit us into. But with our black eyes
and skinned knees, and everything chipped,
we would not fit. So, in time, she quit making
chicken Marsala or Marbella or whatever it was,
and we ate those frozen dino-shaped nuggets,
barely warmed. When she left, we all watched
out the window, straightened ourselves up,
tried to look presentable at last. For once.
We knew she was really gone, might not
ever come back for those pots—but
we boxed them up for her anyway,
one inside the other, however
they would go.