Voicemail Poems

You’re like a paragraph in a book, he says, folding a dollar bill into an origami ring at the bar, and I’m not sure if it’s an insult. He slips the ring onto my forefinger: don’t get too excited. Should I apologize to you or myself or the woman who loved him before? I stay for the story. He is the only one who can make me laugh during an argument. We huddle in the doorway of the pub, passing the vape back and forth in the cold. He mocks my rotating flavors: watermelon, mango, strawberry. I tell him I miss my cigarettes but really, it’s just autumn again. Puff, puff. I’m rotting from the inside. Downing pills with an Old Fashioned. My heart is episodic, my brain one chemical imbalance after another. This unfurling is not what I wanted. He’s the head rush from the first good drag. The first sip of coffee to cure a hangover. I’m living at the bottom of the bottle and it’s beautiful here, all glass and no windows. Who is there left to quit for? The bodies in the lake, one of them mine. The bodies in his pool, al