"Empty Rooms"

by Mason Rodrigue

My apartment of two years
was just empty rooms again,
except for the bed we’d share
one last night before I left.
That was almost five years ago.

Everything I owned boxed up
and stored away,
just like the traumas I’d bring to us
in that enlistment.
Here I am now unpacking all that resentment.

I wasn’t worried about 
shattered fragmentations 
and coping compartmentalizations,
I just wanted our last night in the apartment 
to go without hesitation 
Despite your reservations.

I asked my mother 
where all the furniture ended up.
“That’s all gone. Thrown away.”

It’s for the best that nothing’s left,
I know you slept alone in it once 
the night after the day I left.
I know you wept.

Nothing would change by giving 
one of these empty rooms that bed,
Just like moving to New Orleans 
won’t make you 
be on the other side of the doors
of the empty rooms in my head.

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Learn more about Mason Rodrigue and support his poetry here. You can also follow him on Instagram here.