I stand in your kitchen,

watching you hand my sibling a Twizzler.

I wait patiently for your garage door to open.

You ask me if I still don’t like Twizzlers.

I struggle not to gape,

for my mouth not to become a gaping hole

from which obscenities and tears crawl out

like bugs climbing up the side of your gutter.

In my eighteen years of being

Not once have I ever liked that chewing rope

of false sweetness that you call a Twizzler.

Why do you not know this simple fact 

about me when friends I’ve known for less

then a year know this and can remember it?

My ears burn like the wildfires in the North, 

my eyes stinging from the smoke.

The typical response drips out

from an otherwise dry mouth.

I don’t look you in the eye,

barely say goodbye this time.

It is such a stupid thing to be upset about,

but I have earned the right to be angry

after so many years of bottling it up,

of telling myself that I didn’t feel it.

Or maybe that’s what I tell myself

to justify my rotten heart,

one you’ve buried and unearthed

a thousand times over.

I don’t know. I don’t

know anything at all about love,

for I’ve learned so much of it from you.

You: a man with a hole in his chest,

with no dirt to ever fill it.