The Imaginary Man in My Head

that pale, cool editor

wouldn’t let me write about sweetness.

He called it Hallmark shit.

So I kept it to myself,

lived it with my children,

unashamed to watch the minutes

go by wordless, illiterate

and toothless as a babe.

The problem—there is no record of love

but for what was written

in my children’s cells and mine.

I can only hope the hard stories

I chose to tell the man do not overwrite

the truth of our lived love,

the endless hours we wrote upon each other.