Why Do Recovering Alcoholics Love Diet Coke?

Mariah brings me carrots, and pasta, and money for thirty diet cokes, if I want.
She hugs me in her orange puffer coat, because she knows I have been scream crying
and bargaining with the universe, again. She’s been doing the same.
She grips me tightly and I cling to her, and we cast a spell that makes the five pm winter darkness
 feel less like a life sentence.
 Boys said they loved us and left. And that is the familiar knife we keep turning inside ourselves.
We give every twist a new name, but the hole looks the same.
I tell her that I hope they can taste the sinew and gravel in our father wounds when they chew.
Daughters of Cain, we see each other through the searing brimstone, and we become
each other’s stave as the roof caves in.
For us, shared pain is sacrament. We are both abundant and at a complete loss.
 We are Prometheus and his immortal liver, we are mutilated and made well again.
We think it might all be a joke. We don’t think it’s very funny. We still laugh, anyway.
She feeds me comfort foods and I do her makeup.
She tells me through puffs of a cigarette that maybe we are paying our father’s karmic debts,
the staggering cost of being born to mirror glass men.
I agree that we are probably cursed. We toast to the silk sutures we bestow each other, every
other day or so, diet coke, and the hunger we feel for more.