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