Moving Out of Our Old Apartment

by Betty Stanton

​You spent two days, after the boxes had been carried away, mourning, your 
eyes bloodshot, your body stretched prone across the living room hardwood
 
floors. When we moved in they shone with the slick of Murphy Oil Soap, 
brand new, we slid against each other in socked feet, pretending to dance, 

stripped each other naked in the glow from streetlamps snaking between cracked
venetian blinds. Two days after I left you there the movers came, carried away 

our memories. I took my own; a box with books, plates from my mother, 
movers broke two glasses and the door of my grandmother’s china cabinet. 

Grieving families used to take photographs of the dead, their eyes closed as if 
in sleep, lovingly dressed and positioned so carefully that they would be 

remembered. I have a picture of you spread out across the floor where we had wrestled
together out of clothes, had scratched gouges in the polish moving couches. When 

your mother called, she was surprised I would not come piece you back together.

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