We are the fleshy pit of a wooden fruit that remains lodged
inside the esophagus of a nameless office building,
too historic for corporate enzymes to break down,
too fibrous for second grade impatients to digest.
Pass me your torch—I’m getting blackened today.
Remember when we took our undressed crayons
and grazed them across white paper
over the embossed plaque outside
and the story of this place
spelled out before our very eyes?
And our very eyes, how they widened.
Yes, you do.
Yours was red, and mine was blue.
Remember when you spelled SALSA wrong at the spelling bee,
and the whole cafetorium began to hiss and judge
as the judge bellowed the L-est L ever to be L-ed,
and your ankles were too rusted from embarrassment to get away,
and away you went,
and I called you Mr. Sasla for weeks?
Of course you do.
You were ten, and I was, too.
How after that we ran away like bandits to this place on South Main,
and we picked and we plucked at the locks,
and scratched away at the ashy continents on the walls,
etching oaken paintings of our names married to profanities
even though we didn’t know the meanings
that made them so profane?
I know you do.
You wrote SHIT—I wrote FUCK YOU.
And that time when you tried to kiss me
in the corner by the condemned yellow jacket nests
that sagged like hard candy on the splintered walls,
but your empty lips tumbled into the tentacles of a cobweb,
and the moment snuck away
with the stagnant smell of mesquite and adolescence?
Ha! Look at you!
You were laughing—I was, too.
And remember when you got your braces off
and I just about cried because I hadn’t seen your teeth
in days—in weeks?—in months?—in years?—
and through the snaggled gate of your cuspid
and incisor that no amount of metal would ever fix,
the medicated steam slipped, and spilled like milk?
That was last June.
We sat right here, where were you?
And that night when the fugue of sirens tugged at our ears
and we frantically clogged the seams
where the light seeped through with our socks
and our shirts, try try trying to keep the haze from sneaking out—
only to find it wasn’t us they were after, it was the
bank robber next door—and we swore to never come here again?
Our faces changed, too.
Yours was red, and mine was blue.
Yet, our torch melts to ash, and we become blazed as one.
We are here, reclined against rusty limestone as smoke
forms above our skulls like question marks, as red rivers
meander closer to our pupils, as the taste of our memory becomes
too salty to swallow, yet too sweet not to taste just one more time.