you can be wistful all you want, but the thought gums up the gears, stops any and all traction whatsoever. whatever, he said and put his beer down and fumbled through the crowd, jostling for escape, stumbling out into a night filled with drunken women and flustered men. he did everything for you until he couldn’t do anything more, her mother said, and wiped her husband’s brow while their daughter bit her bottom lip yet again. why do you mock me, he asked, and in the dark with the bedsheet covering only the bottom part of a slender thigh his lover replied, because you love me as no other, because no man would take this kind of abuse from another man and love me so fiercely. these are the lies we tell one another between the friction and the release, to get from friction to release. it is never happenstance, only a series of moves across, an accumulation of flesh wrung free from bone.