(inspired by Petersen Vargas’s “fourteen boys”)

1
here’s to the boy who
i unknowingly married
when i was a kindergartner
only for him to unknowingly divorce me
inside a moving train
thirteen years later

2
here’s to the boy whose
once-euphoric image
instantly floated away from me
as the heavy riffs
of an underrated rock band
ignited a crowd surf
that only moved from east to west

3
here’s to the boy who
had the courage to ask me why
i was good at spelling
but never had the guts to ask
me if I liked him back

4
here’s to the boy
whose memories never ceased to haunt me.
from the questions about cigarettes to the questions about bra sizes,
from the diary entries to serial poems,
from us not happening to us never happening.

5
here’s to the boy who
treated me as an eyepiece
when all i ever wanted
was to be
his favorite specimen

6
here’s to the boy who
i turned into a melancholic four-chord song
when he proved to me that
white roses and love letters
don’t work well as bribes

7
here’s to the boy
who decided to sum up
three years of
our one-sided,
on-off
relationship
by responding “when?”
the night
i finally had the sanity
to tell him,
“don’t cry. i loved you so much.”

8
here’s to the boy
whose hand i held
for it was about to
be sliced thin  
by my razor-edged ribs

9
here’s to the boy who
i wish i met in another Earth

10
here’s to the boy who
hugged me
backstage
and threw tomatoes
at me
frontstage

11
here’s to the boy who
is two-dimensional,
but is a million times human
than the people i know

12
here’s to the boy who
plucked the right strings
when i began humming
an unfamiliar tune

13
here’s to the boy who
collects broken hearts
for his own pleasure,
but was very disappointed
when he wasn’t able to break mine

14
here’s to the boy who
left me alone on a boat
so he could swim his way
towards a luxury cruise ship

15
here’s to the boy who
knows too much
about me
but too little
about her

16
here’s to the boy
whose sighs inflated my lungs,
and who later on taught me how to build sandcastles
out of his cigarette ashes so he could eventually
blow them down with his exhales.
(not because he likes to destroy what i’ve built,
but because he always enjoyed
the sight of me basking
in the powdery white-gray ruins)  

17
here’s to the boy who
convinced me why
i shouldn’t procreate

18
here’s to the boy
whose brain i wanted to unspool
so i could crochet a beanie
out of his to-die-for fibers

19
here’s to the boy
whose outward boffs
made me wish
he was my creator,
and whose own silence
drowned
out his pulse
last September

20
here’s to the boy
who made me wish
i had a ****, bigger than his,
so i could show him more ways
to squander masculinity

21
here’s to the boy who
told all his stories to me,
and who hated math so much
but was better at it than me

22
here’s to the boy who
i broke off midsentence
when he thought Richard Linklater
was directing both of our lives

23
here’s to the boy
who lavished me with his
words and inspired me
to come up with
this spin-off

24
here’s to the boy who
was vindictive enough
he didn’t entertain the thought
of depriving me of a body

25
here’s to the boy who
thought he had a slot
on this poem