The anti‑Valentine

(Photo by Oliver Braubach)

You must know that you can turn around
And find that objects are in love with each other:
Toothbrushes kissing while another looks on.
(You don't know what this existence is like.
Strangers fear my sunken eyes, blisteringly narrowed.)
At work one Nalgene bottle watches over a smaller one,
A doting mother and a little one at sport.
Even donuts nuzzle and caress each other, the jam-filled ones —
The cruller is lonely.

It gets my hackles up.

I force pencils on my desk to lean away from each other in their jar
I look for sympathetic lamps and curtains, but they're all cold
And tell me snootily to get over it.
Books turn away from me, hiding their faces
Icily from me, coquettishly from one another.

I want them to not touch
I wish I could control gravity
I'd make them float apart, alone, each object isolated and helpless,

Alone.

At home I open the cutlery drawer to see one spoon lying atop another: silver foreplay,
And I shriek, "I've caught you!"
"Now, now." says the top spoon in its plastic organizer, "yes, we are in bed together, but
            truly, we were just talking."
So he says — yet I slam the drawer shut and I seethe.

Miriam Breslow is a prize-winner in the Department of English’s Clare Murray Fooshee Poetry contest. 

Photographer Oliver Braubach is a PhD student in physiology and neuroscience.