You Have All the First Lines but No Time to Write

Poems are one-night stands in cheap motels that sell Twix in vending machines. Short stories are summer flings in rented homes that smell of strangers, salt, and fresh cotton, but the novel, the fucking novel, is the first blush of a honeymoon that morphs into a settling that invariably becomes the minor compromises you make in service of a shared life. The novel is two toothbrushes in a tin cup. It’s can you just do the dishes for once? It’s two bodies taking up lovemaking like cross stitch, and it’s the uncomfortable silences that stretch from room to room in those moments when you wonder how it is that you got where you are and do you get out of it. Or do you linger?