Maybe I’m not as angsty.
Don’t need to drown
in the drone of lost
love. The haunted house
no longer my dwelling.
My ghost still the past
but not possessed by
obsession. The passage
of time a lapis lazuli–
ten years of wisdom
in which my sadness
may look the same,
but now able to withstand
a storm without music.
(originally published in Stickman Review, Fall 2022)
Watching cardinals by the window, I expect them
to drop dead. But they never. Instead, we keep drinking
bird-themed beers and fly in orbit around each other’s
other lovers, because when we are drunk we call ourselves
a cockatrice couple, the way we span to such great lengths
to say, we’re blooming, there’s nothing wrong, we bloom.
Always, we come down to earth and say we can’t, never
could. When we land in water, our human qualities
return. Can’t withstand
the current.
(originally published in *82 Review, Fall 2022)
At Giesen Haus late, we drink long
islands on empty stomachs until
we make nacho shots – chips loaded
with beans, jalapeños, cheese, the finisher
being the rest of our twenty-
two-ounce Doppelrocks. Because
the Haus is closing (we do not
know soon, for good), we
walk the blurred street to
The Basement, get another ale,
maybe two. We tweet Rob
Delaney when we decide we need
thirteen more drinks before the end.
We make another shot, the Dog Blowjob–
Raspberry, Blue Raspberry, Jameson–
IHOP at 2 AM, our waitress tells us a time
she was stuck in the snow, drunk, and a
customer paid her for sex. Cinnamon
pancakes, hash browns, we wait what feels
like forever amid endless summer now
that we are adults. 5 AM we walk back
to Giesen Haus and somehow, I drive us back
now. We cruise down Whipple to Bloom’s
hypnotic Wild, witnessing the sun attempt
to rise from the depths of night. In a few hours
I finish reading Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,
which I want to like, then watch birds
in branches with binoculars received
in the mail. I peer through all the nothingness
green. I start Siddhartha, play Skyrim, binge
Breaking Bad. Later in the week, I put in
thirty hours of restaurant work with
all the time in the world.
(originally published in Dreich Magazine, Summer 2020)