Wire-bound creature, you were.
You thought it was
a strange damn way to love,
neurochemical, blood
under flesh, over bone.
Biology has a wet mercy.
You could understand everything, except
that some things can’t be—
there’s an element of randomness
to all of it, the 1s and the 0s,
nerves tangled on nerves
lined up against slick muscles,
built right in a universe
of crooked orbits, spark
and misfire.

Ours was a relationship
of unresolved bug reports, toothpaste
and machine oil, running hot,
running cold, running. Yes, the fan
in the bedroom so you could lie
under the blankets at night.
Yes, the charging port under
the kitchen table, so we could eat
together. I loved the way
you fixed everything—the leaking
faucet, the broken fan, the weird
clicking noise the fridge made—
until the morning when
you looked across the table
at the one thing in the apartment
you couldn’t adjust to operating
standards—I, strange creature,
malfunctioning enough
to let you go.

[Editor’s Note: Publication of this poem was made possible by a gift from Risa Wolf during our annual Kickstarter.]