Katrina Kaye

My girlfriend gets drunk
and tells me about the life she almost had,
the man she almost stayed with,
the home she almost created.

She is remembering tonight:

a sweet regression to a time                when there was
more fruit on the tree,

when she had the novelty of choice.

It happens to all of us, doesn’t it?
That regress to younger days and different decisions.

But this was a hard one for her
and the confession of “what if” is
pouring out of her in words mildly slurred
in her high pitch, baby voice
that she only gets when she’s upset.
She keeps saying “I could’ve” as if
any of it mattered.

She is exhausted and broken and vulnerable
and honest and angry and innocent and
so human I can’t help but to love her.

Love her for being able to express and confess
all the lost fruit: the ones that dropped,
the ones that remained out of reach.

There are parts of me that have fallen away,
that I rarely miss, but every now and then
I have a vision of that former life:

a dream or a discombobulated memory
of what might have been                     trips and tricks

before flaking away like the top layer of
skin shed in the sun.

 

“Figs” is previously published in Steel Jackdaw Poetry (2025).