What I Like Most about Our Fights

Not the way a secret resentment can be provoked— how to speak it feels like a seed

spit upon the table between us, mean and small. Not reconciliation’s little gestures (enough water

left in the pot for two, your jacket hung back on its hook) and not the relief of after:

backs to the warm brick of the balcony, the pack of matches passed from you

to me, smoking side by side. What I like most about our fights is the midst

of the thick silence, how it fills those moments to the vividness of a picture: it’s raining, warm,

morning. We are angry. We know it is going to be okay. For now, we don’t speak.

I toss a brown egg up and down while waiting for the coffee. The weight of it

falling to my hand; the click its shell makes when it hits my ring—