Precise Requirements for Enumeration

List poem: every city I have cried in
while listening to that Placebo song.
It took ten years and sixteen apartments
to lose the CD he burned for me,
longer still to forget his accent.

List poem: every coffee after midnight.
In his Facebook photos he looks healthy.
I could say happy, but that’s just a privacy setting.
There is a daughter who looks nothing like me.

List poem: have you noticed how, when healing,
the wound begins to pull the surrounding skin
toward itself—is that self-preservation or jealousy?

Is it weakness that I keep forgetting
(how silence does not mean yes)
menus, the plots of books, directions,
the name of the restaurant
where neither of us cried but we should have.

Maybe the sea is also healing its hunger.
Maybe next time you look
I will be a scar instead of a girl singing.

One time I forgot for two decades
that a man in a dark movie theater
sat down next to me, unzipped his pants,
guided my small hand to his dick.

List poem: skin.

The worst thing is
that we remember interruptions
better than we remember endings.
 
 
 
Adriana Cloud has read Harry Potter in three languages. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, The Nervous Breakdown, McSweeney’s, Armchair/Shotgun, and other journals. Her chapbook Instructions for Building a Wind Chime is forthcoming from the Poetry Society of America in 2016.