After Whitman on his 200th birthday.It is swoops and loops and bumps and roots and rocks
It is crawling and climbing and scrambling and teetering. There is a fallen tree trunk crossing a bit of creek and either you balance on it arms akimbo or you splash along beside it, holding onto it for balance. It is bordered by sharp barbed-wire fences you cannot lean on to guide you because you'll cut your hand if you have hands. Have I been writing poems all these thirty years that assume everyone has hands? Do we instinctively lower the volume on the portions of each other's stories that assume we're part of the club? Do we understand that nothing -- and I mean nothing -- is universal? the only thing organic in this park is the people who ricochet off concrete stairs ramps walls footbridges they have cargo shorts baggy jeans a single dreadlock a mop of curls a lightning bolt shaved into the hedges that surround an ear a t-shirt with someone else's name on it no shirt glistening nipples a pitbull with no leash they leap fling themselves from metal poles graze the ground propel off a bike rack hit the wall climb it like stairs and for a moment with the magnolia taste of the air in your nose you think you could too you forget and remember all at once
how it felt letting your heart be the first to clear that first big drop on the roller coaster how you straightened up your cramped neck as you rolled to a stop how your feet once knew how to ride the down escalator how it was to be in love with movement and unafraid I sat shiva for
you, asshole. Don't ever scare me like that again. The first blossoms are doomed to die when the frost comes back like it just walked into the kitchen, opened the fridge, forgot what it came looking for, and walked back out.
The air smells like: cigarette smoke, the feeling of tripping over discarded bits of green plastic on the sidewalk, the kind of allegiance to a foreign government that we're okay with because it is at least still white, car exhaust, vomit, and I guess also promise unfulfilled. It is louder than winter or maybe winter is loud but we don't hear it with our windows closed. On the back of an old bodega receipt
I keep a running list of all the books I would buy you as gifts if you were still my friend. You'd definitely read them -- I'm not good at many things but giving is one of them -- and you'd tell me if they were worth borrowing, but you'd of course know that I didn't just buy them for the chance to borrow them from you. I don't need to do that (I'm a librarian for fuck's sake) and besides that's not what gifts are about. It wouldn't work the same if I read them anyway. Your eyes and the words react like vinegar and baking soda; I'm just a kid with a chemistry set. So I never read the books, but I keep the list in the zippered coin compartment in my wallet with other useless things like nickels. And just like ridiculous nickels, too big for their worth, I hang onto the titles because they might come in handy someday. |
Meesh Montoya
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April 2024
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