Behind my back my girlfriend

is watching The Butterfly Effect

with Ashton Kutcher—back when 

he was a teen heartthrob

and still is in her eyes—

behind my back, while I’m looking out 

at our reflection in the patio door

backdropped by the night

and its blank gaze waiting on

me to think of these words. I watch—

behind my back as the whippet sits

watching too—I wonder what 

is there for him to watch—he hears the kid

version of Ashton’s character

get beat up and bullied, moving

behind my back an evening passes

without my engagement,

my attention fixed on a fiction

in front of me, held within a mirror—

a world beyond the night.



Sean Chapman is a British writer living in Cornwall beside the Atlantic and amongst the blur of a blue Whippet and a red fox Labrador. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in Marble Poetry, Squawk Back, Raceme, Prole, Dreich, The Opiate, Trouvaille Review, Anti-Heroin Chic and Poetically Magazine. twitter: @SeanChapman_1