Room for Improvement
by Heather Bourbeau
Our therapist had suggested note cards that reminded us why we were together. They started off as small Post-its left on the toaster, “You make me laugh when I drink milk” or “Your taste in furniture has always been divine”. Soon the exercise became a game, a MadLibs for partners. “When I think of your _______, I _________.” Or my favorite, “I first noticed your ______ when we were _______ in the ____________.” We recycled that one for weeks. Various fill-ins included “bank account, shoplifting, Hamptons” and “bad Finnish accent, cruising the straights, bathroom line at Disneyworld.” The sillier the response, the more I fell in love. I might not have been engaged in the chase anymore, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy a good game. That was until our therapist, whom we tried to dump unsuccessfully, gave us comment cards. We knew she was trying to become a brand, and who could fault her, but the “Room for Improvement” made us see what we missed, why we’d drifted into too stark a relief. Then he left the love letter we now have framed above the bed. “I first noticed your ____capacity to improve___ when we were ____doing naked yoga____ in the ___room that once was reserved for therapy. Don’t change. Love.”
Heather Bourbeau’s fiction and poetry have been published in Alaska Quarterly Review, Cleaver, Eleven Eleven, Francis Ford Coppola Winery’s Chalkboard, Open City, The Stockholm Review of Literature, and the anthologies Nothing Short Of 100: Selected Tales from 100 Word Story and America, We Call Your Name: Poems of Resistance and Resilience (Sixteen Rivers Press). She has written in Madagascar, read in Tunisia, worked in Liberia, and wonders where she will explore next.
What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Room for Improvement”? I wanted to explore if MadLibs, which encourages the absurd, could be a way for two people not only to laugh, but also to appreciate one another. Also, there’s a nod to my friend Ann, with whom I once pretended to be Finnish and in a garage rock band.
Check out the write-up of the journal in The Writer.
Matter Press recently released titles from Meg Boscov, Abby Frucht, Robert McBrearty, Tori Bond, Kathy Fish, and Christopher Allen. Click here.
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Poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction/prose poetry submissions are now closed. The reading period for standard submissions opens again September 15, 2025. Submit here.
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