Break-up poems usually explain themselves: here is what went wrong, here is how it felt. Catherine B. Krause's "My Ex-Partner" does the opposite. It lists its complaints with a perfectly straight face and makes every one of them impossible. The ex "profited off the Napoleonic wars," a crime so out of scale for a personal quarrel that it works as a sneer. The poem is about leaving someone adored by everyone and sheltering with someone who isn't, and about how little of that can be said in reasonable sentences.
The form supports this deadpan manner. The poem has fourteen lines, split 4–4–6, the length of a sonnet, but there is no rhyme at all. "Wars," "tied," "eagles" and "cheesecake" scatter in four directions. The rhythm is plain speech. The opening line sprawls, and the others settle into a flat, conversational stride. Nearly every line is a complete, end-stopped statement, so the first two stanzas sound like testimony read into a record. Only the last stanza loosens, with a question and then a single sentence that tumbles over two lines.
The first stanza builds the ex out of contradictions. They are grand and incompetent at once. Their moon is "the size of a pair of blue eagles," a unit of measurement that means nothing but sounds like boasting. They "insisted that their shoelaces were tied," which is the kind of stubbornness that defends a trivial point because it can't afford to be wrong. Then comes the verdict: they "couldn't construct a proper cheesecake." The stiff words "construct" and "proper" make a small domestic failure sound like an engineering disaster.
The second stanza moves from the ex's claims to their effect on the speaker. The ex drones on about Neptune, and the "long whiskers" patting the speaker's back are both animal and condescending. The line "As if I could afford to drink ginger tea" is the only moment the speaker's own circumstances appear, and it reads, judging by the contrast with the Napoleonic profits, as resentment about unequal fortune. Then the dog "whistled sweet nothings into the void." A dog whistling reverses the usual order of things, and the cliché "sweet nothings" is taken literally. The tenderness on offer was empty.
The third stanza turns on "Everyone loved them except for you." The poem swerves from complaint to address, and "you" enters as the ex's opposite. You "didn't know how to play the triangle," the simplest instrument there is. The failure is almost a virtue, since this person doesn't perform or charm. Then comes the poem's one believable image, "your house of books," which suggests quiet and shelter. "That's why I left" pretends to be logic, but the reason it gives makes no sense, and that is the point. The emotional truth arrives without a sensible argument.
The ending leaves the reader unsure. "Don't you understand?" sounds like a plea, whether to the new beloved or to us. The ex "was an octopus," and the metaphor suggests many arms, a grip on everything at once, and a talent for vanishing in a cloud. Then the final image, "seventeen minutes away / From the pit of an avocado's frustration," is oddly exact, and nothing tells us what the minutes measure. A pit can be a hard core or a hole, and the poem never says whose frustration this is. One reading is that the beloved lives always close to some small breaking point, and that the speaker has chosen that fragility over the octopus's polish. It is also the only named emotion in the poem, and it is attached to a piece of fruit.
That displacement is what makes the poem worth reading. It is funny, but the comedy covers real hurt and relief. The poem suggests that the reasons we leave a person can be exact and still impossible to prove, and that tone can carry a meaning the facts cannot.