1. How it Starts

This far west of Richmond it’s green as Emerald City, and we roll into town late in the afternoon,
sun spots through the trees and mottled on the sign off the highway exit. We’re late to a party.

You didn’t want to wake up that morning, being too hung-over from the night before. We’d
slept naked as babies on the couch with your long hair and my long hair tangled all together. The
apartment manager came looking for you that morning and walked in to find us like that and with
another long-haired guy sleeping on a mattress we’d dragged into the living room.

Beer cans, a bong, ashtrays, and clothes littered the floor, draped over the TV. Leave It To
Beaver played on mute. The apartment manager started yelling he can’t tell who is a boy and who is a
girl. You were supposed to be cutting the grass. You threw up twice. Finally, we got ready to go to your
hometown.

You turned onto the highway that takes us past tobacco fields, soybeans, cows fucking. We
chased that sunset for hours—catching up to it and watching it slip away.

We hit up the One-Stop for beer. You tell me you once dated the girl who rang us up. You point
in the direction where your parents live.

The party is a mile down a dirt road in the forest at some kind of hippie love shack. You park
near a dozen other cars and pickup trucks strewn about the field. A metal trash can is completely on fire.
A guy sits on a moped drinking a beer.

I get drunk and high and smoke a cigarette on the front porch. A beautiful girl with spiked blond
hair sits down next to me and tells me that she’s been to the city before. I don’t ask which one. We
watch the smoke wind up into stars. We watch the guy on the moped drive around and around the fire,
dropping the bike and getting back on it until his legs bleed.

The next day I meet your parents. Your mom asks me what I am, why my skin is so dark. She
snaps our picture in the front yard—the tobacco field behind us not yet cut down and not yet harvested.
I’m wearing a college sweatshirt and we’re both smiling. Red tulip bends into the frame.

2. How it Ends

Gaunt face looks into glass of dark alcohol hoping to find the muddy bottom of a wishing well.
Getting over you happens in dark rooms with guys who want me to sleep in my boots, and get
pissed off in the morning that my heel tore a hole through the sheet. Hung over, I stand up shaking like a
baby bird in a nest with awkward, backward bending knees.

It ends without love. I find someone I barely know and hug him, pushing my breasts into him,
giving away what I don’t believe in. This is all the love I know about in the world, the start of the life that
came after you.

Voices in my head echo like a frat house of boys chanting drink drink drink. To get away from
you, I stumbled down a hallway, landed on my knees in front of a door I got hair-pulled into. There is no
gentle way of saying this. I hazed myself raw to get to this life, bad as it might seem, so I didn’t die
getting out of the old one.

It ends without metaphors about pulling tobacco flowers off rough stalks until your fingers
cramp. It ends without you noticing any light-mottled signs on the highway; without anyone to chase
the sunset through afternoon air. It ends before the poem finds solace in the quality of light in the
penultimate stanza.

It ends without rhyme. If there is a tulip, there is also the darkness it grew out of and waits to
take it back.