The first New Year’s I spent alone,
I doused everything I ate [on wedding-
dinner plates] in grass-fed cultured butter: filet,
langoustines, asparagus. Decadence honors
our absence, memorialize another night amid
this limbo of emancipation: in three weeks
I will be free.

[Waiting for the date is like having blood drawn
after doctor’s orders to see if the disease was
contracted or in your genes, a deadly mistake
or ancestral fate.]

Tonight, I anticipate the first year without your
web-sticky fingers, caramel lace of a croquembouche,
trap disguised as dessert, renounce the lotus—

                                                                      I hope we fade
from each other like the bleaching out of a stain.
Treated properly, you’d never know it ever existed:
wine on a linen shirt, blood from a wedding dress.