Wherever You Are By Lisa Thornton

     Paul Padshewscky CC

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Wherever You Are


If I search for the heartbreak, I can find it in its own room with the door shut. If I close my eyes and remember the Christmas lights strung over your bed, hear Simon & Garfunkel’s soft voices singing about the man in the gabardine suit and smoking cigarettes on a train.

Then I feel it like indigestion, coming on with a low rumbling and the skin on my arms gets cold. I smell the chilly streets of San Francisco, waiting for you to pick me up me up after nights of wiping crumbs off tables but you never come so I hop the bus instead, the cables overhead popping, the rain on the sidewalks splashing and stand there soaking in our room, watching you curled up in bed. I don’t know yet why you’re always sleeping. 

My heart beats faster and my feet are frozen in that Idaho stream, my hands in your curly black hair. My eyes caught in yours, your smile bathing my chest in warmth as our tent casts purple light on the rocks. 

Before you dropped the whiskey in the kitchen. Before you cut a hole in the screen to lift your head from the pillow and vomit into the alley. Before I put you in the shower and fed you bananas because that’s what the emergency nurse on the call line said to do. 

If I search for our love, I can feel it. Huge and perfect and doomed. I wonder if your breath quickens when I do.

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Lisa Thornton lives in Illinois with her husband and son. Her poetry has appeared in Matter Literary Journal, Roi Faineant and Fiery Scribe Review. She has a BFA in Political Science and a Bachelor of Science in Nursing. Maybe someday she will master something. She can be found most days staring out the window waiting for the corn to grow tall and on Twitter @thorntonforreal.

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