Repetition

After reading about cherry blossoms
I see them from the car, more fibrous
than those I’d pictured. Even the sun
has become a tumultuous relationship,
the way it felt when I spent too long
with my Virgo ex before I’d started
putting retinol on my face each night,
even drunk, even with a lover waiting.
I don’t miss it, that heat, except
when I loop the same song on my walk
to the coffee shop. Some days even this
feels isolated. Some people look good regardless
of their gender. I watch my cheeks puff
and hook a shadow in the screen. I wait for the blossoms
to fall but it turns out they’re made of copper,
beautiful and heavy and natural but shaped,
made for a different timeline than the summer
and then the fall. I add this tree to my mind.
Everywhere special to me there was once
a dead tree that, specifically, was special to me
before it was cut down.