Leaving Chelsea Annette Oxindine (bio) Keywords Annette, Oxindine, London, apartment, city life, expatriate, American, England Tell me, what does dusk doto Sydney Street, spent of allour afternoons, and I'll teach youhow to say Novemberuntil it's rent of moth and flame,its every last leaf a rhetorician,asking what is tether without float?I can already tell you whichbranch the wind will snap.It's the one the soft bakery lightloves most, resting in the Vthat is both fractal and crevice:what will keep coming,what comes but once. I just can't.I really can't but I do still love you, says a womaninto her hand, eyes fixed on the crosswalk.For the next block I imagine the walk-upof the still-loved one, the heather sofa,navy pillows, narrow shouldershunched over skinny jeans, a mashupof Ben Whishaw and PJ Harveystirring a reheated Marks & Spencercurry, Hendrix singing, "Fly on,little wing" as motorcycles gunto race the lights on Kings Roadaround the corner from our rented flat,where we'll watch Friends on a loopbecause we're still sad leaving Americanever made us sad. [End Page 360] In the morning we'll goto the Tangerine Dreamfor a last slice of ginger cake,and in the Chelsea Physic GardenI'll bend over green tendrils and brittlehusks with the same excess of tenderness.I will say to you, the palest autumn lightis how the dead finger-paint,instead of I will love you in a hundred years. I will ask, might it have beenhere where the salmon-blush mouthof Wilfred Owen said goodbyein how many ways I can only wonderto Lieutenant Sassoon, whose dark eyesstay biographical. I'll say, let's get smashedand sneak back after dark to ask the gingko treeswhat one beautiful man said to anotherbefore he went back to the European slaughter,instead of saying I have loved you for a hundred years. [End Page 361] Annette Oxindine annette oxindine's poetry appears in the Gettysburg Review, Gulf Coast, New Orleans Review, Southern Indiana Review, and Willow Springs, among others, and is forthcoming in Colorado Review. She has also published scholarship on the work of Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Bowen. She lives in Ohio, where she is a professor at Wright State University. Copyright © 2021 The Massachusetts Review, Inc.