AL-MUSRIFUN

“And do not spend wastefully. Indeed, the wasteful are brothers of the devils.” [Quran 17:26-27]

When they ask how I used my father’s money to buy [      ],
I will say: daughter is a synonym for regret. We were sincere

college girls, exhaling the after-morning musk
of our jilted mistakes. We fucked up. What else

can I say? We kissed everything with a knife’s heat.
The poetry was supposed to be about the snow dust

on the windowsill of the studio apartment where I practiced
generosity with other sweat-stained bodies. Yes, me

and my derelict girls. We hardly got a text back and thus
our Plathian hymns. Our friendship based on how evenly we split

the [     ]. How dangerous we could make our sadness
sound. We mistook romance for fortuity—the [           ] 

pulling up on his bike was really only five feet tall. And he fell.
But he knew how to unhook a [         ] with one quick hand. At least

that’s what he said. Of course I thought of my father. But it wasn’t
fair. I wanted things too: guilt subsumed; a dirtied mirror.

Killing yourself was just the sound of someone else’s music next door.
There’s one photo in particular: JD with a [     ] in one hand

and [     ] in the other. Blanket to the chest. A stranger’s house
on Halloween. A smile goofy enough to make me pay

the difference and someone always went home crying.
I liked the clean breaks. I woke up

to nothing. America was a sink I could fill.
People clung to your arm so hard it almost broke off.