"A Series of Goodbyes" by Sam Moe

1. You don’t know how to leave and stay gone. There are strands of your longing all over town; chalk residue on his driveway, the sticky notes they couldn’t peel off the window even after you broke up, even before that, when you stopped sneaking over to kiss in the middle of the night. The necklace she ripped off her neck and threw at you, you keep it. Same with the necklace of stars, your favorite from a New York City street vendor, ripped off your neck by accident, hand of a drunken boy you were in love with, all kept. Dozens of glassy stars, small black beads, a galaxy inside a ceramic heart with chipped roses on top, abuelitita’s name written below the flowers—who made this beautiful box, anyway? Everyone in your family is an artist, a ghost.

2. This is just to say goodbye. I’ll keep everything close. I don’t know when you’ll leave, only that you will. It’s your nature, to dissipate, to turn into ocean foam, the glint of dew on a slice of cantaloupe, thick fog, stick bugs, these are all remnants of my you. What I’m trying to say is get going, stay gone.

3. Summertime walks. The way we pressed our stomachs into the railing, someone carved a heart in the metal, I wanted to go down to the creek, I wanted to scoop fish in my hands and offer them to you. As if that could have made you stay. I’d say, look, they’re silver like bone. But you’d already grown bored by the time I knelt at the edge of the hill, walking off into the tall grass.

That was butterfly summer. The one and only time I saw golden fields. Do you still hold these thoughts inside your head? Here is a list of things you might still know about me: I am a writer; I am tired; I am scared.

4. The week before I moved to Illinois, I cried so much I thought I would pass out from dehydration. Should I draw you an image of my beloved restaurant? Maroon, and full of candles. An open kitchen, reflective shelves for bottles of wine. The restaurant is the restaurant is a poltergeist. I’ve told you a thousand times about money and sadness, guests who broke my heart, guests who tried to sew me together. There was an older man who came in on Mondays and ate two cheeseburgers, always saving a bite for me in a paper napkin, I got lemon in the creases and cuts. People are trash, you tell me. This is just what people do.

I want to tell you about my new obsession with peaches. How about the first rainbow I saw in over a decade arched into the fire station. I take the long way home, daydream. In another life, you ask me what I dream about, and I whisper, you. Arguing, talking, drinking tea. Sometimes baking, asking me how the writing is going. Later we’ll walk around and around the lake and I’ll pretend to be healthy. I’m so funny just for you. We get into a ten-minute conversation about bugs because I’m too scared to be myself. Besides, do I even have a center? A consistent core, a heart.

5. The one in which you stop talking to me. I try to fix the silence, but can’t. Even the wind stops making its sounds. Cars barely hum. I almost forget your eyes.

6. Sick on hope, I imagine you over the green edge, when night leaves and wolves are barely visible, long crawl back to the ocean, confetti of sand, hungry loneliness, take me back into your life only to destroy my heart. You don’t care for overgrown weeds, green heaven, ladybugs, we grow apart.

I am delusional, tell myself, I’m still spectacular when you’re not around. Regardless of the storm, the ants make their way to a strawberry in the backyard. How do I explain the muscle to you, someone who has never noticed such an instrument, the pain in the reeds, the red-hot web in my hands and wrists, why not forgive the jellyfish who bit you. We argue until my body turns into a scar. It is a very small, loneliness, and it is summer, nonetheless.

7. My mother says she will never eat another chicken. She tells me if she got a chicken, she would keep him as a pet and name him after her father.

— When I see mangos, I think of grandma, she says. — I think about her when we get coco helado, I reply. — Yep. Yep, yep, yep, yep.

She’s in Manhattan, laying on the floor with her legs against the wall, exercising. She tells me there are bananas in the room, and when her husband finds really ripe fruit, he puts them on the comforter because there is no space in the apartment. I’m only half-listening, irritated at the line in the gas station.

— What are you doing? I ask her, just to have something to say. — I’m standing here on the phone getting annoyed alongside you, wondering why that’s happening.

I have nightmares all week she dies before I come home. Wish I could tell her I love you. Wish I could tell you, too. Soon, I whisper to Massachusetts, we’ll be together well into June, making necklaces at the kitchen table from emerald beads.

Forgiveness, too, is a kind of leaving. I’ll take out the wounds when I’m ready, inspect them one by one for depth and infection. The wound from the day in Central Park, when we fought so much, I let a fistful of balloons float into the sky. By the time we walked home, across five avenues, she was slamming the door in my face, telling me I should die for all she cared.

I called to let you know I can let things go. I will let the past float away into the sky.

Sam Moe is the recipient of a 2023 St. Joe Community Foundation Poetry Fellowship from Longleaf Writers Conference. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming from Whale Road Review, The Indianapolis Review, Sundog Lit, and others. Her first full-length collection, Heart Weeds, was published with Alien Buddha Press (Sept. ’22) and her second full-length collection Grief Birds was published with Bullshit Lit (Apr. ’23). Her third full-length Cicatrizing the Daughters is forthcoming from FlowerSong Press.