We make out awkwardly on the bed.
And her shifting weight is a tide or the back of the bus.

Have you seen her lately?
Not since she moved out.

When we go to a costume party together she
wears a lycra body suit and duct tapes a dildo

to her crotch. It bumps against me in the darkness
like a bottle-nosed dolphin or a chair lift.

Outside the party she kisses me again, her
costume insistent. She has been dead for

two-and-a-half years. She lay down to sleep
at thirty-six and her heart failed. Like it

failed a test or failed a warrant or failed to
come in to work that day like everyone else.

My fingernail split down to the cuticle and
she climbed into my bed at dawn smelling

of chemicals and the last stand of the hospice.
She moved out on my birthday and I ripped

up the note she wrote. I ripped up the note
she left me that she wrote me, when she left.