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Erica Fabri

He said, You are a White Elephant,

always drinking tiger-milk, then spitting it
on cowboys to get attention. Your nose keeps
getting longer! You wrinkled-up the left side

of your face, to make me fall for you, and so,
you were it-the apple and the light,
the turtle and the bird. I tied myself to you

like a boat dock. I saved-up pennies
to buy small red fish and blue glass bottles.
I tried to make the old hat last-but it split

like tin snaps, rotted away like that old brown
rattletrap you used to drive. Now all I have left
is a gutbucket full of all the things we made together:

five ropes of braided licorice,
three sets of sea-shell wind chimes
and a bird's nest of the wiry hairs

that we tore off that coconut we broke
on your mother's kitchen floor,
that muddy summer, ten years ago.