by Michael Emmanuel Ian Parker a. i assure my lover I’ll divorce my sob stories. i flourish in the failure of this promise. every window i open leads into an alley growing wild with weed, with the teeth of the hurt. in my grandfather’s teenage diary are flash stories of people who left: the high school teacher who taught him to spell heavy, the trader across the street who showed him a war could fit into your pockets, the first woman he hurt. i tap him at night and angle the