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6 “eating iS an aCt of oPtiMiSM” —kathLEEn VoLk miLLEr The inverse is true. Not tonight or tomorrow, it’s one of the seven or eight kinds of self-abuse: the body a standoff— midnight and beer is when I think of her, as almonds and Asiago, clementines and wine spread out on the floor of her apartment, no chairs, just pillows and talk of the men we loved who gave us grief. More wine and we’d find the ninth or tenth kind of abuse with talk until sunrise, until the men we loved were gone or briefly solved, all absence and what we could do without naming, but now she is gone, unmetaphorically dead, let me say it again, dead, beyond any thought she could have of me as Corona and cigarettes, Monterey Jack and the men I still love but can no longer tell her about, it’s brutal, this wanting to call 7 and tell, the eleventh kind of abuse, no dinner tonight, and yes, I still smoke, the twelfth, the one promise I made to her, but too thinly sealed now, the way the skin of the clementine pulls away from a fruit that’s too ripe— no, not tonight, not tomorrow, there are promises I can’t keep. ...

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