I told him I was fine with him leaving
he could have all the useless things we’d accumulated
he could even have the three Maine Coons
since he cared that much more than I did

but he couldn’t use my words against me

my words (he’d be damned!)
that I’d used to dub the mistakes
before the end credits,
those were mine. If he siphoned them,
I told him
I’d take him to court and get my rights back.

We had chunks of bliss
lines of foreplay
                during preproduction
so much script that I was on a speeding train
of exaltation
that took me one year to realize

he’d foreclosed on our adventure
and took up skiing down slippery
dark control rooms
lined with monitors of bars and tone—
those colorful, trancelike seductresses
he had to have
                he had most of them before testing the airwaves
tried to volt back to the storyboard
but opening credits are not my thing!

I told him that. I told him back
during screen tests.
I bellowed that; threw it all back at him
and he didn’t like my demeanor
so he threatened to leave me, using sentences
that were foreign to him. Scenes-worth of dialog
that he’d heard from my guttural acumen

That louse!

If only I could trace my original outline,
its whereabouts,
I’d have proof of my own doing.

Sabrina Stuart Smith is a Toronto-born, Toronto-based writer of Afro-Caribbean descent. She is currently shopping around her first chapbook and is working on a second. Her work is published or is forthcoming in Aunt Chloe: A Journal of Artful Candor, Pink Panther Magazine, and Shot Glass Journal.