listen—
this is just the way it is

I see your headlights in the drive-thru
last winter
in the camera lens tonight

this is not personal, you said
you cried, thinking it was dark enough
voice steady (if you focused on the radio)
not personal, but permanent
and I was in no position to argue

lately, I haven’t had much that I’ve ached to tell you
—that feels a little personal—
and I only remember when certain angles of light
hit me like a freight train
after the sun goes down

sometimes I close my eyes
imagine I’m blind
shapes and light veiled, soft
day and night melting, overlapping
rain and sun both bright

words you said and hums you
may have made
I can’t remember, now
memory and vision criss-cross
past and daydream clasping hands

when I open them, you dissipate
each time I call you back
growing warmer

when I think about the color of my eyes
I think of blue-green
I think of gray, sometimes, when I’m feeling replaceable
I usually don’t think of the red
veins twisting through white
or the red veil covering all of it in the morning
when I blink awake
enervated by all the waking I did in the dark
instead of resting

when I think about the color of your eyes
if I’m being honest
I can’t remember what it was

dividing time by years made sense for the aztecs
they clocked the cycle had begun anew
the ice had melted just like before
they guessed—crossing all their fingers—
that it would again

walt whitman divided time by breaths
his line breaks echoing his full throat

cross-legged on new year’s morning,
I think that I don’t want to divide time at all
just one long hum
to keep the beat

your voice is vertical somehow
mine is hoarse, still

I remember shouting
into pillows, hardly muted
playing back your new york inflections
like a cassette

constructive critiques
transcribed in your palm lines
obscured by clenched muscles
I didn’t know what was written on the last page

I do now
it’s not much

I keep you close by.

it’s by the book to watch,
to tether, to keep you walking straight—
I believe in order—but
I can’t say aloud that that’s not why

whispered, barely:
it's, instead, because
without locks, I think you’d go
if I looked away, I’m afraid you’d go

I want to go back to that dream
where you touched my palm
and I kept it quiet
where no one saw me stopping short
while you were close behind
barely there

now, your electric fingertips
keep me awake
the details blur, and
I want to crawl inside that dream
and sleep till noon

often, I revisit the etchings we made
they betray our precise age then,
arrested—permanent,
for the moment—but tenuous
subject to the forward march
of you, of your outgrowing

while I remain
so much of me left back in pictures
in words on walls
so much of me still sixteen
so tightly woven
into the pale imagined future, faded
and the technicolor past
you gave me

so little of you, not nearly enough
but all there is

you stand up straighter now even on off days
the poetry not gone with the milk teeth after all

the electricity in his finger tips when he
says “how you doing, my friend”
and when he soothes the muscles in your calf
echoes, revives other muscles
their own memories of contracting so long ago

he knew how long it would take to heal you but
he’s only here until December

you will finish getting better, but you
won’t be like you were

as a child, you learn step lightly
step gentle but with power
don’t take what isn’t yours but
never leave what is
and especially don’t
hurt anyone
not ever

you, from the start, learned the first
strength was harder than a soft touch
but some things were fragile
sunday happiness
butterflies
and you tried to keep your word

leave the levain out overnight
don’t overwork it in the morning, knead gently
mist the inside of the dutch oven to create steam

this crust your crowning achievement, you
capture it from every angle
shy to dig in

savor the feeling of a chest swelled with pride

and then ugly, uninvited, the memory of his
swelled for a different reason, a
distraction

even on your sweetest day

“I will make it happen,” you said.
“Please trust me,” you said,
and you didn’t deserve it and so I didn’t.

And I’m better off now, but a little bit it
nudges me lightly that I was right, and you
were never coming back.

And mostly I hate everything you did
and said, and mostly I never want to
hear your voice again.

But a little bit it nudges me lightly
that a little bit, somewhere,
I’d give my right arm to have been wrong.

I’d give my right arm to tell you I
don’t forgive you
can never forgive you

and use my left to grab your hand and
forgive you

in the winter, ice had crept over her
slowly. it had hardened over her collarbone,
her hips, her tongue, her hands.
but on this february afternoon, the sky almost gaudy,
light spilling into her car and mixing
with his laugh,
it crackled
split
and melted.

you were hard most of the time
to read, to touch
I wouldn’t bring you home

now, though, when I ball my hands
I feel your silk-soft hair against them
remember all the colors of your chest

and you twinkle at the corners of my eyes

I want you to tell me
the truth about my hands
and what they are worth to you

will you grant me clemency
when they blister and crack
when they redden, raw

up close, it’s no secret that
beneath the skin, there is something
roiling

and I want to know if I should
keep you at a distance

shrink the shapes down to fit in your hands
they are not legible like they used to be, there is no
beginning or end or denouement
there is just the dust that settles once you’ve forgotten for long enough

it’s not ever really long enough for your shoulders, though
they twist with knots you can’t visualize, so deep your
fingers stiffen and your eyes look hollow
remembering is harder

don’t breathe as you cross the street, you could catch it
you darkly note that it doesn’t really matter, he’s
already gone
what difference does a mask make

but you hope it does
and you haven’t yet let go of thinking when will it end

though more and more it’s met with
I can probably live like this
and whiskey

to not know you takes me back

the year is 2004. the place is oval beach.
the wind is calm. the voices far away.

in a few days, I’ll twist my ankle
in a few drops I’ll forget when rain was warm
it wasn’t always like this

it wasn’t always like you

I fell asleep last night dreaming of golden rings
of sunlight holding together quick inhalations
all over the floor of your room, letting them go
just fast enough, but only.

I wanted to write like you and breathe like you and
blink to the beat of your apocalyptic pulse
when you’ve spent the day stacking papers,
receipts of all the times you said okay

When it wasn’t. I fell for you behind closed doors,
imagining your aging memories of pain casting
you and me in the same bronze. But you,
instead, were buoyant gold-plated sturdy
forward-facing and I,
as ever, will find a way to keep you anyhow.

the long-suffering fire
sputtered against my cracked knuckles,
still warm and blue when i
packed up and went.

the air, now, is still wet with memory,
spiders tangled in silk of their own making,
collected in corners,
hardly touching,
hardly touched.

one syllable once stretched across my artery,
small and forgettable,
until blood and letters
stopped in their tracks, and
i became myself in the silence after the sparks.

from far away you can’t hear the matte echo
in pupils small but deep
and skittish.
if you let in too much light,
it all looks gold.

if you let in too much light,
you’ll miss it.

this is where we sat
my elbows bony
your mouth a hard line

some walls are painted yellow, some
lined in mirrors, yours
bare
i was

ancient
crude

drawn in eternal by words that mean
things that they don’t sound like, building
materials that belie their insides
lengths i’d never go to

we are both what we say we are
but you are more

maybe it was on the dam, graffitied
by hummingbirds
where i counted red ants
and minutes
on the bridge of your nose
at close range

and where we said goodbye
shrugged our shoulders
and never came back

or maybe it was on the brown couch
opposite the copy machine
that covered my hands
blackened them while you were away
you might have been proud

maybe it was in the recesses of the library
where i drank too much coffee
and found the only thing that drives me

or maybe it was right here
where i made up a nightmare
and never could shake it after that

it’s difficult to articulate the precise difference between drawing pictures and writing words. neither is particularly honest, especially when you ask me. there’s always a temptation to let a small truth stand in for a larger truth, and that is inherently a little bit dishonest. universality is only for some, only sometimes.

but imagining it is there more often and more broadly helps put a leash on the chaos of coffee shops and prison cells and tenements and castles. to imagine we are all held together by a shared sensation is a thrill irreplaceable by a one to one experience, by a touching of foreheads or being in love.

that’s only if you’re a good artist, though. sometimes you just have to draw exactly what you see, and then the only stretching of the truth is acting as if the chair legs aren’t there because they aren’t visible behind the table. if you’re a really honest human being, you can draw them and then erase them. but nobody is.

To grow up a restless gull, itching to go in every feather, spreading fingers across continents and craving every one of them. To finally go and lose your hunger. To settle into the next place like it’s the last, tuck your head under your wing and know only parking lots. To forget the sea was yours.

To need to hear the same song every day to keep your head. To paint a mural of where you’ve been so nobody suspects. To avoid eye contact because you’ve got nothing behind yours. To forage and forget. To forage and forget. To forget.

dizzy from the onslaught of the springtime I thank
my lucky stars for strings and steamboats I thank
my quiet mind for resting sometimes I think
my lungs are stretching in your absence I worry
that I ask too much of you

to find a place to call home
where the bed nests flush in the corner
and the arms don’t loosen till you say so

to show all of your teeth and blow away
the bombs and dark purple air that cloud your sleep
and invite you to stay a minute longer

to live in boxes if that would make you closer
to knowing what it’s like to be a maypole
or a wild turkey or a king

to square your shoulders when you walk
and when you shudder
and when you listen

to find a place to call home
where you can leave without asking
if it’ll be there still at dusk

from your cohabited bed, you say you can’t see out the window
only in the living room do you feel peace, only during economic conferences
do you remember who are without a frame

springtime air doesn’t taste the same without winter giving way
and you say you’d like to be where people wear sweaters and
comb their hair. you still comb your hair when you remember to
and you think you’ve still got a way with words

but you don’t use them much. you blink often—
who’s to say why—and over crackling lines of hi-miss-you
i hear your voice ache for my bricks and long leash
and hot-cold orange future

you don’t know the half of it

pointillist muscles ache
by turns sharp and muted
echoing soft water lilies
once planted, twice uprooted
caught on canvas
then let go

the radiator sputters
stoic but senile
they taught you acrylic lakes
were more gray than blue
and you paint
by the book now

hard winter holds your brittle fingers
in what it imagines is a gentle grip
you smile to hide your grimace
the quiet sun politely reminds you
what you promised
then let go

this morning rings no bells of my first time
moving lead-legged through elm-split mist
to your doorstep

that day was tinted mustard-yellow
i had my eyes covered tight
and the trembling was mine alone

this morning is all green
like the inside ring of your iris
and the trembling is everywhere

i wait patiently
the mist moves
and not much else

i like names that are real words,
english words like brown or smith or brook
and i like hardware stores with paint chips in the windows
and i like crooked noses and smiling eyes and plastic bottles

insignificant is what you said you were
it’s what you said it was to make applesauce
for a latke party, because what does it matter
to make a meal or a statement it’s all
so small compared to everything else so
insignificant

but it isn’t, i like streetlamps and the way they backlight
branches and i like the trees that still have leaves in december
and i like having nowhere to go
and everywhere
and it’s not insignificant
it’s not

i can’t help but remember all the things you taught me—
how to drink to excess and wake up smiling, how
to cook rice, and where the train is—now
as you lie sideways on the couch,
listing baby names with a cracking voice

cecelia sounds all right

there’s only the pursuit of a good story and good stories always have tears on grass
and on chests i was the professional and you were the amateur the good story
was always at my fingertips i could teach you how to cry

you, i don’t know i want your story, i think  i want your chin against my forehead
and i want your casual quiet accolades i don’t want to teach you how stories go

you’re pushing up against your five year reunion i’m pushing up against the space
where i choose where this is going this is going to your five year reunion this is going
to hell and you would listen to everything i could teach you i could break you with
your permission, of course

you’re wrong about one thing i can’t take secrets with me very far and i’ve lost
the line between what is and isn’t part of the original script you’re pushing up against
your five year reunion i’m pushing up against the only thing i know

this is an invitation to act rashly
I close my fists, full of imagined marbles
as big as your big hands and hot to touch

I imagine sitting cross-legged on his floor
we are in front of his salmon couch
on the frayed area rug I imagine he has
I imagine he has mismatched dressers

I don’t know why I imagine us on the floor
his couch is probably softer than it looks
sometimes they sit on the floor
in the movies
maybe we didn’t want pizza grease on the furniture

our knees touch, I imagine, indian style
unmoving
we exchange embarrassing **** we wrote in college
I think how college was earlier for him than for me
how while he was losing his virginity I was
bussing back from a jv tennis match

I imagine him laughing at a word in my poem
I defend my phrase, lunging then lounging on his quadricep
he’s showing teeth and crinkly eyes, putting
his hand on my forearm draped on his leg

he thinks the phrase is cute, actually, and so human
I imaging smiling back and we’re looking at each other for a little
too long and the air is electric in the way it gets when there’s
poetry in it and teeth showing and skin touching and we are
very close to one another, I imagine

I can’t stop imagining
I unclench my fists
quietly drop the marbles
this is an invitation to
act rashly

I turn to you and tell you I’m having
a really nice time

your pulse has been steady for ages now
and you only cry at shakespeare— never at your frailty
you’re not frail

tonight, when the door locks behind you
and you jiggle the doorknob; you
pound the glass and nobody hears you
not one soul

panic rises, boils in your ribs
and you think well hey
at least only security guards
will see me like this

they tell you that you can’t go home
bound by street lamps calculus and city boys
you are wearing a blazer as we speak and
your prom queen’s popping out another
forgettable night bearing down on you where
your streets aren’t made of cobblestone and
everybody talks like each other
and you can’t go home maybe but
you can’t stay either

I said I wasn’t gonna write another poem about hometown
stars and hooded sweatshirts and how life was a little warmer
when your thin fingers were on the steering wheel of that
**** station wagon or when they brushed up against mine

I said I was bigger than that now and I didn’t miss you anymore
and my own car didn’t stall at stop signs anymore and I didn’t
have a bonfire in my ventricles anymore cause I didn’t hear your
name much anymore, not these days

and I said I could barely even remember the time I promised
to never forget you and wasn’t that just the way it always goes
but now I’m here and small under the stars and awnings of our
dusty hometown and it’s still warm without you and I don’t
know how it ever got to be like that

and I do remember
and I wrote you this

who was i to be so bold and who
were you with teeth like picket-fences
and eyes like my father’s lawn

and where was i to aspire to that 1955 smile and where
were you when i remembered all the lawns looked alike back then
and picket fences kept my father lonely

there’s an art to
pouring a guinness
to make it taste like
chocolate and
the idea of her

and there’s an art to
smirking at bad puns and
positioning your fingers
on imagined guitar strings
before you pull the rug
out from under her

and there’s an art
to doing both by accident
and realizing one tuesday
the next year

i remember the time you told me that
ginger soup would cure my cold and that
eating pizza with a fork made me so strange
that you weren’t sure we could be friends
with a sideways smile lighting the corners
of your amber eyes

i was drinking wine from a jar cross-legged
finally bold enough to ask you over

and i wouldn’t let you kiss me but as you laced up your
boots for biting february, i called out to you that i’d changed my mind
and you kissed me so **** hard it nearly hurt
but it didn’t

a year later, cross-legged again
so many days between you and now and the fading
memory of your warm chest on my ear
and i wish i'd crawled inside the ticking clock that day
tucked the minute hand into my elbow crook
and stayed

i have known the taste of violet; it has
stuck in my molars long after i’ve finished
it has been my wine-stained secret
i have known

the striated forearm and clenched fist
the mirror in the ventricles
and the hardiness of them
the measured beat
beat
beat

i have known the scrapes that even cardboard leaves
with a slip of the hand on its way out
i have known better the scars that mouths leave by association
on the shin, on the skin, on the cortex

have i known anything but
violet
i wonder

breakfast cereal disintegrates between tooth and cheek like
andean snowflakes do underfoot where I go to get
gone from the day-in-day-out ladybugs on the ceiling

I swallow it for the calcium
it doesn’t taste like much

and they smell when they crash into the mirror

I saw your daydream face like I used to see the ghost of my brother after I'd all but forgotten I had one. My lamb eyes and your lambdas crashed in mythological accidents and I all but forgot that I had you too.

farmland, not death, is the great equalizer. death separates the famous from the infamous, the young from the old, the lucky from the alone. farmland, stretching to the horizon, makes pennsylvania into connecticut into ireland into kansas. you can't tell monet's haystacks from mine.

we make the best of things, she said about the rainy season
our ten-dollar words swallowed by timid tongues and our
mile-wide headaches on our shoulders

we make the best of what, quizzical I ask her
she stood to lose more but she was better
she ran five kilometers at a time
she ran pretty circles around my holiday smile

ten-dollar words instead of money I carry with me still
to remember that I got there once too and
to feed to the mechanic when the engine stalls

does the engine ever stall
it does

the bitter and undersold other-edge of perfection
where it turns around twice and settles down among
stuffed turtles and hedgehogs and buries its nose in its tail
only to spring up at the noise of passing traffic or
loud voices next door or
a sigh
overtakes the perfect first face of it
the one you seek your whole life and that
comes for an instant before fading to gray
and you scold yourself for the growing thought that
it looked better from a distance

tears on the steering wheel blur taillights
into september-christmas. raindrops in the rearview
become transitory constellations. an overdue
stop home slides away.

home ceases to be fluid sentences: becomes periods,
exclamation points, question marks, parentheses. staccato whispers,
sweet reprieves, lunch breaks, sick days.

you fit where they’ve left space for you. you know the shortcuts
and the long ways and where to get a coffee. you know where your
head rests on his collarbone. you know when to come
and when to go.

and then you go. and it’s midnight where you’re going and the
winged streetlamps beat like a butterfly migraine, eyes threatening to
close before you’re home.

wait—
which one was home, again

it was the hooded-sweatshirt, sit-close-and-pretend-you’re-cold, bleacher-seat,
whiskey-and-coke homecoming that you never had when the leaves changed.
but the leaves changed anyway.

the damp grass smelling vaguely like your fireplace as the world got quieter,
your nose in your precalc and your foot tapping and how-many-years-left
of solo fridays, you counted the suburban stars but didn’t tell anybody
how ******* beautiful they were above your head, because they were yours.

when you wore your high school colors, you were cold for real. no pretense
in your shivering, no flutter in your abdomen because he wasn’t gonna talk to you,
and you didn’t really care, you shrugged. but the leaves changed anyway.

and you changed, slowly. grew taller and smarter and prettier and then the
remaining solo fridays shrank to none, and you left. big sweet snowdrifts turned to spring
and you shared whiskey-and-coke with the city, your stars dimmer but abdomen
finally fuller, and limbs warmer and no sweatshirt because you didn’t need one,
and hands all over to hold and feeling all three kinds of love at once.

and then the accidental homecoming, and the changing of the leaves
and the hooded-sweatshirt shivers and knowing you’re so much bigger now than the
suburban stars and the backward glances of the bleacher-seat kids, but the damp
grass still smells like your fireplace and suddenly you’re small again, just for a
second but god that second, you shiver and turn around again. you’re so much
bigger than this but homecoming, this whiskey-and-coke homecoming still isn't yours.

refracted sunshine pauses on boxwood leaflets before
whipping around to color white walls white and whiter
just shy of blinding, shy of why’d-you-ever-look-away

quarter-miles before, a stone bridge frames a roadway with
one wrinkle, a painting you’d **** to catch on canvas, if
you could stop the car and hold it in your iris long enough

this morning, you woke from fever dreams to an it’s-all-right-now
I’m-here, and you saw that he was right as they faded and shrank
in the daytime and remembering it was you who once was

so insistent that the world looks good in gold

this summer, the first of its kind, has been a very difficult one. I’m not unique in my anxiety for having the comfortable, intricate, beautifulinspiringwonderful rug I’ve come to love so deeply over the course of this chapter of my life ripped out from under me, but I think I’ve felt the pull particularly strongly. I’ve also lost quite a few people that I loved and love, in varying degrees and to various uncontrollable forces—first distance, then ungenerous and unforgiving illness, then irreconcilable differences of bagel topping and dog breed preferences. my world has been even more transient and transitory than usual, weekends punctuated by drives from my old home to my old home, neither of which I feel like I particularly belong to anymore. my weeks taken up first by a job clouded with exhaustion and headstrong disinterest, then by nothing at all, now by a conflict of interest—a place I love inside a place where I never wanted to land.

on the nights when I’ve fallen asleep, dreams of crying parents and misfiring deadbolts have awakened me, and those nights have been difficult to come by. I’ve felt the ennui brought on by the inescapable digitization of the world and the awareness that I’m not smart enough to be above it. that I’m not smart enough to even properly love the poetry that I love, to speak the language that I thought I knew, or to use the temperamental dishwasher in my own house. I’ve buried my misgivings about myself in lamentations that my friends have been scattered to different cities, so they can’t prop me up anymore.

I’ve shared pieces of myself with people more nakedly than ever before and with much higher stakes, and though I regret precisely zero of those risks, I’m learning it’s true that the harder you fall, the harder you’ll fall, and the latter isn’t something I’m yet accustomed to allowing for myself.

I haven’t yet accepted the death of a presence in my life that has been so large and multifaceted throughout, constantly reminded when the GPS winds me through the churchyard where she officially is now and when I pass her picture on my kitchen counter and when I keep on loving her wonderful family. when I remember that she’s the reason I had these phenomenal four years in this phenomenal place, and the reason I’m for now sitting comfortably in a job that I love.

and I haven’t yet accepted this transition into having so little control, so little trajectory. it’s a big life. this summer, as I said, has been very difficult.

but august, in time, will fade into september, and when it does I can say “last summer was very difficult." and I can remember how to stand up straight and that there’s a reason I have those city-scattered friends in the first place. and I can figure out that the lesson I learned is that risking a fall makes for a strictly irreplaceable, exquisite six month repose—not just a bruise—and maybe a new city-scattered friend. and that the death doesn’t erase the radiance of the life. and that distance is sometimes bridgeable, and that figuring out where to be takes a little time, and that nightmares aren’t there during the day, and that everything is, little by little, sometimes, usually, always all right.

she was more than just the stuff of storybooks, she was one. hair long and light and breast-grazing, star-gazing wisteria-eyed girl. a mystery on spindly legs. a fawn I looked at once and never looked away from. her lemon-meringue demeanor, breathy bubble-bath speaking voice and short white dresses, sandy bare feet and a crinkled, secret smile were all I saw and I saw them as many times as she would let me, new eyes for her driftwood shell every day. she wasn’t from where I was, nor was she going where I went, but when I said hello, she flashed her sunstorm smile at me and buckled my knees. I loved her before we even met, and I knew she would never do the same because she didn’t need to; she didn’t need me and she didn’t need anything, she was freewheeling, she was everybody’s sunrise, she had that smile.

but I wrote the book on living impossible dreams and she told me her name one day, as the horizon painted her gold and stood her still in front of me. she told me where she came from, and where she was going, the gift of gifts: unwrapping her storybook from linen scarves on the sand that evening. this big and beautiful myth shrank to size: she was real. she was flawed. she had grown from sadness, she was scarred, and for that she was more beautiful still. she didn’t need me and she didn’t need anything and, what’s more, she wouldn’t have it. her doors were closed because she wouldn’t need anything, she couldn’t need anything, she was scared of needing anything like she wasn’t scared of anything else, and for that she was more beautiful still.

but I wrote the book on living impossible dreams. as I came around more often, she fell for me right back—my far-off wisteria sunstorm was quiet against my shoulder, breathing in sync with me and drifting off wrapped up in me, driftwood-intricate and real as no storybook before her next to me. she needed me, now, so new to her and laying her bare, stripping away the mystery on her gazelle legs and casting a fearful desperation on her long light hair. instead of needing nothing, she needed me more than I was there, just like she was afraid of. she couldn’t get enough. wrapped up in me so tangled she couldn’t see the horizon anymore. she fortified her quirks so they could stand alone, they grew overbright, she became them, they became all she was. a pretty driftwood shell, a mystery covering nothing but the hole her heart hides in, scared into paralysis by its own fevered motion.

what do I do with this new shell? this new shell that looks exactly like the first one but isn’t—her eyes are still wisteria and her laugh still air-light to the untrained ear, but my hands are too strong to touch her without cracking it. what do I do with this storybook I wrote myself into without permission, this fawn that refused captivity but now can’t remember she was ever free? what do I do with my hands? do I make them weak so I can hold her or do I leave her to herself? what’s the end of the story?

I wrote the book on living impossible dreams and sunstorms aren’t real. she smiles but now it’s only hollow. I can’t look at this beauty I destroyed. I walk away because I have nowhere else to go and I can’t watch her shrink. she was never mine. now she’s nearly nothing.

you stand on the corner of your just-gone home, dirt from below the torn-up asphalt making its way beneath your sunglasses, the distance between now and then something you can no longer stretch your knees and step over. your first love is boarded up across the street, succumbed finally to the burn of nineteen’s shallow pockets and standing in the way of a new apartment complex. you walk on, humming so you can’t hear the heavy step of all that’s taking your place. it’s a strain on your ventricles, loving and losing and owning and letting go, when you’re here again. knowing the porch’s soft wood at number 18 while the door is bolted and a stranger’s boots line your closet floor.

it’s not all lockouts and dire prognoses. your tomorrow professes to accommodate a higher wattage than the sconces in your old room, and your visits taste like love and memory and breakfast, and his bed is warmer than your own because he’s in it, and he welcomes you home like that’s what it still is. it feels like he’s not wrong to say so—sometimes, you still belong there. cold coffee in hand from the farthest corner where they know your order still. an opinion on which pizza joint has better marinara. a favorite bathroom. an indelible mark on your old library desk. some of it is yours.

but some of it isn’t. some never was, and some has slipped through your fingers. you hum a little louder as the months go by and the boarded windows give way to a brand-new storefront—one that never knew you at nineteen—so you can’t hear the heavy step of all that’s taking your place. but you keep coming back.