This selection is included in NonBinary Review #8, available here.

As another barrage of her
conversational grenades
goes off… with her aim,
it’s either a black eye or
a bite in love within the heart
of our nightly conflicts.
Forget waving white flags—
it’s war when she craves
the spark of our most
unfriendly fire, forcefully
showing all her pointed views,
cacophonous in number
smashing of her passive
aggression symphony,
screaming…broken
glass is just like glitter,
isn’t it? I can taste

the familiar stinging
refrain of splitting up
again. This time not even
another volatile romp
marching to the beat
of her unrestrained wildness
would make up for her
latest verbal upset
offensive of: you’re
in my veins you fuck.
Now I realize the reality
in her favorite tongue
lashings. And with one final
bloody lip, sans her
nakedness, in our fox hole
lies the overexcited remnants
of another explosive love
affair, without the dynamite.

Adrian Ernesto Cepeda is an L.A. Poet who is a graduate of the MFA program at Antioch University in Los Angeles where he lives with his wife and their cat Woody Gold. His poetry has been featured in The Yellow Chair Review, Thick With Conviction, Silver Birch Press and one of his poems was named Cultured Vultures’ Top 3 Poems of the Week.