Sara Kaplan-Cunningham

Romance

What I should have done, I did. I sliced potatoes
thinner than my fingers and fried them in oil.
I stopped drinking coffee to avoid staining his handspun mugs.
I wore the small red bikini he bought until
the smell of sweat and baby oil burrowed into the nylon.
I kept the heat below sixty-five.

I don’t want to refer to our time together as late winter,
but it was. Every morning, I walked past a cardboard box
packed with thunderous apples that slowly
petrified with cold. I stayed with him
in an apartment hoisted over the ocean. Even now,
I couldn’t tell you what happened. Small lights
hung from the ceiling like bottled stars.