It's true I couldn't do it, couldn't make my life fit neatly into a poem so here I am sitting on the bench at the gym between sets, between songs, counting my breaths still alive in my 40s still chasing my dead dad blaming my sad mother who sits in her wheelchair in a studio apartment in Berryville, Virginia rewatching Gilmore Girls Greys Anatomy Friends old Haley Mills films Law & Order and I'll go home after these heaviest lifts of my life massaging my right hip, the one mom’s replaced twice after carrying a secret infection inside the old hardware of the first until it seeped into her blood weeks after dad died alone in the sun, an old drunk who was, for some reason, on that day sober, and I was sober for several years but now I have some wine, still thirsty, and still so hungry the hungry hungry hippo I’ve been my whole life, inherited a bottomless desire for more—fun, long nights, one last spin around the dance floor, which is why he left isn’t it—just like me or maybe I’m just like him—he couldn't do it, couldn't fit his life into our small home away from the world, couldn’t fit his love into the vast dance floor of his mind or the sad songs he half-assed on the guitar, slept till thirsty, wasted on a moldy piss-soaked mattress I pretended not to see after Shane and I went through his things desperate for the fortune he said he’d hoarded for years but all we found were jars stuffed fat with coins and crumpled ones, half written songs and poems on smoke dyed yellow tablet paper—this is it isn't it, how a poem sweats out like whiskey in an iced glass on a hot day, never at my desk where I fail but here, anywhere I’ve let it all go to lift, run, dance over a chair, soaking pelvic sweat onto a bench I'll wipe off for the next lifter, typing quickly into my notes before I lose it because I’ve lost so much, can barely read what I journal about like we all do now, all our quick videos insisting on an aspirational pop psychology that isn’t real, a healed place we’ll never reach, never fit into anything, never make sense, visit doctors who'll replace again the outdated and broken hardware, complain about media conglomerates who'll replay our shows I’m hungry for something more but what—never had a solid answer so I stretch out, head home, heat up a prepped meal, turn on those Gilmore Girls who keep talking instead of reading the unread books on my shelf, like my mother I know what comes next and the one thing she’s right about is how good it feels to stay safe, to already know one of those girls won't say how she feels and someone will try to love the other one and never get close, and they'll make a mistake and someone will bail them out and love them anyway and over a huge feast one of them will ask how they are and the other will say they're fine, they're fine, it's all fine, let's eat.