In my youth, I met an artist
whose name fell from my mouth 
like a mussel 
suckered to the roof of it.
He wants me in the 
suburban badlands of the south,
with an apron squeezing the rolls of my waist.
He is dying to salvage something he never had. 
I am but a babydoll;
We are playing house. 
He wants me in sundresses
and in rooms coated in canary yellow wallpaper.
He wants the kind of life that would drive
a woman like myself mad.