Our Breakup Is Archived in a Literary Magazine
Page thirty-eight, spring issue, anyone can borrow my heartbreak.
My ex-boyfriend lives in a library in Cleveland now, filed under periodicals, spring issue, page thirty-eight. Anyone with a library card can take him home for three weeks at a time.
We were together for two years and four months. The breakup happened in our kitchen on a Tuesday in October while he was holding a colander of rinsed spaghetti over the sink. The steam kept fogging his glasses, so I never actually saw his eyes when he said it.
What he said was, "I think we both already know."
The pasta went cold in the strainer.
I remember thinking, absurdly, that nobody was going to eat it now, and at the time that felt like the saddest part.
It wasn't, obviously.
The saddest part arrived three weeks later, at two in the morning, when I found his handwriting still magneted to the fridge. A grocery list. Oat milk, batteries, the good bread. He had underlined the good bread twice because I always bought the wrong one. I sat down on the kitchen floor, right there on the cold tile... and wrote a poem on the back of that list because it was the only paper within reach and I was afraid that if I stood up to look for a notebook, the poem would leave without me.
For a month I revised it the way you pick at a scab, which is to say constantly, guiltily, and against all medical advice. I cut his name. I kept the colander. I cut the part where I begged, because on paper it read as weakness and in real life it had felt like the bravest thing I ever did, and I could not stand the gap between those two truths. I kept the steam on his glasses. Every draft, the steam stayed.
Everyone warns you about publishing personal poems. Your friends warn you, your mother warns you, the internet warns you in list form. They warn you about exposure, about regret, about the ex reading it. What nobody warns you about is the acceptance.
Nobody prepares you for a stranger saying yes.
I almost didn't send it anywhere. I had a drawer full of polite, dishonest poems that had never left the house, poems about the ocean that were really about nothing. Then a friend sent me an essay about why safe poems lose, and I hated how precisely it described that drawer. So I sent the colander poem to eleven magazines in one furious evening, the way you rip off a bandage, or eleven bandages, and then I closed the laptop... and felt sick for a week.
Ten rejections came in over the winter. I kept them all. The eleventh reply arrived while I was standing in line at a pharmacy, waiting for cold medicine, my nose raw from tissues. "We would be honored to publish 'What the Steam Kept.'" I read the email four times.
The man behind me in line asked if I was okay, because apparently I had made a sound. I told him my poem got accepted. He said, "Is that good?" and honestly... standing there with my fever and my basket of soup, I did not know how to answer him.
The contributor copies arrived in March, two of them, in an envelope stiff with cardboard. The magazine was heavier than I expected. Real paper, cream colored, the kind that makes a sound when you turn it. I found myself on page thirty-eight, under a serif font that made my kitchen floor look dignified. In print, the poem seemed calmer than I had ever been while living it. That is the strange alchemy of type: it takes your two a.m. and makes it look inevitable.
The launch reading was in the back room of a bookstore that smelled like dust and orange peel. My hands shook so hard the pages rattled, an actual audible rattle, and I had to press the magazine against the podium to make it stop. When I read the line about the grocery list, a woman in the second row put her hand over her mouth. Afterward she found me by the wine table and said she had a list like that in a drawer at home, from her late husband, and she had never known what to do with it. We stood there, two strangers holding plastic cups, both of us wrecked by a piece of paper about bread.
He found the poem in April.
Of course he did. A mutual friend, a screenshot, the usual supply chain of small betrayals. His text said: "Page thirty-eight. The colander. Really?" I typed four different replies... and deleted all of them. The one I finally sent said, "It's a good poem." Three minutes later he wrote back, "It is." We have not spoken since... and I think that exchange might be the most honest conversation we ever had.
Here is the part I did not understand until later. Literary magazines get archived. Libraries bind the year's issues into hardcover volumes and shelve them, and universities scan them, and there is a system called interlibrary loan that means a student in Ohio who has never heard of me can request the spring issue and receive my heartbreak through the mail, handled with gloves, due back in three weeks.
Our breakup has a call number.
It has better institutional support than the relationship ever did.
A poem you publish stops being a wound and becomes a window: strangers get to look through it, and you finally get to stop standing there.
I used to think that was a loss, giving it away like that. Now I think it was the only way to set it down. The poem holds the colander and the steam and the good bread so that I don't have to carry them through every new kitchen for the rest of my life. When I want to visit the sadness, I know exactly where it lives. It keeps regular hours. It has late fees.
This spring I wrote something new, the first thing in years that was about love while it is still alive instead of after the autopsy. It is clumsier than the breakup poem, and happier, and much harder to write, because hope has fewer good images than grief and all of them sound like greeting cards until you bleed on them a little. I entered it into a monthly poetry contest instead of letting it molder in the drawer, because the drawer is where poems go to be safe, and I am done writing safe. Whatever happens to it, it will not die of politeness. That, I have learned, is the whole game with healing: you keep making new things that can survive outside your body.
Sometimes I picture her, the student in Ohio. She is in the stacks on a rainy afternoon, avoiding an essay, pulling down the bound volume because the spine caught her eye. She flips to page thirty-eight without knowing anything about me, or him, or that October. She reads about the steam on his glasses and, for one paragraph of her life, a stranger's kitchen becomes her own.
Then she takes him home for three weeks.
I hope she returns him on time. There are late fees.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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