Dear reader,


It won't be long before they electrocute the trees with candy colored Christmas lights. Soon everything will be gone: memories, glances, the year. Every thing will dissolve into nostalgia and our lives will become more patchwork and less hopeful. Soul-crushingly sweet our smiles will be, as we watch that disguised meteorite crash into our existence.

Her name was Reno. Her dad joked he named her so because she was the result of a gamble gone wrong.

I could see the stitching around her eyes start to falter, as tears slipped out like a young nineteen year-old girl, running out of the back of a double-wide. Away. Away from it all. Leaving her father, the mechanic who could only fix things with his hands. Running through a field as shimmering as her nails, touching the tall grass with her short fingers.

"I'm not trailer trash," she said, "I've just had it rough."

Reno could see things others couldn't see. Frequently she painted wrecked cars, and I asked why, to which she explained, "Some accidents are allowed to be beautiful."

I fell for her the way her jaw drops after one of my inappropriate jokes: quickly and with such joy.

She had the same answer to when I asked if she liked movies and if she missed her mom.

"Of course I do, Josh," she looked at me and smiled, "Hey buck, have you ever seen True Romance?"

A woman after my own heart.

We watched Christian Slater shoot Drexl, and, like a bullet to the chest, she placed her hand over my heart.

"My, oh my, are you sure that rib cage is big enough for that thing, Mr. Haines?"

She looked a little like Patricia Arquette, but identical to Michelle Williams.

"Are you aware that you look like Michelle Williams?"

Reno ran her hands up my legs, across my torso, and held her hands at my jaw,"Are you aware of how good of a person you are, John Mayer?"

"Ah, yeah. I've gotten that since high school."

She smiled, looked down and up at me,"No, the part about you being a good person? ...You're the drawing on my wall."

I didn't know what that meant.

"I had this drawing-so terrible-it was of the sunset on our hill in Welling Valley," she looked into me and down, while smiling,"Anyway, the sun would kiss the grass every evening, and one day I thought I'd draw it and keep it in my room. When every thing got ugly with my daddy's drinking, and when he beat me something awful, I wanted something to remind me that the light sometimes goes away but will always be back another day. You're my light, Josh. You're the next day after nineteen years of cussing and drinking."

We made love on my bed, as, through the window, the sun bathed our bodies. Her body was a sculpture and her voice was as soft as her lips. I was terrified.

Pulling her hair back, she stood at the foot of my bed, naked,"Are you scared of little ole' me? You look as white as a ghost."

"No, I've never felt so alive... You're so ******* beautiful."

Reno and I lain in bed while Parks and Rec played on the television. Her index and ******* walked across my chest and stopped as she asked, "Josh, have you ever been in love?"

I touched my fingers on hers, studying them with my eyes, and then I looked at her, "Yes, once."

"What was it like?"

I thought I'd feel pain but instead I smiled, "Fantastic, fleeting, and always a little out of reach."

She cooed, "I can't wait until I think I love you like nobody else."

"Me too."



Sincerely,


Joshua Haines

There is something so wrong
About a crush. An invasion of privacy,
They never asked to be trapped inside
My skull,
Their name rolling silently on my tongue.

Despite people constantly explainings music theory
I’ve never quite grasped the concept
Of different keys.
Because to me
Something would feel sharp and
Fall flat but
Be all too natural to you

And I had difficulty trying to articulate what I meant to say
Because we had such an interesting dynamic
And dissonance is positive when done correctly,
Right?

Constantly, you played chords on my heart strings
Like the threads wound tightly against the pegs on your guitar.
Beautifully
But never gently
Rarely slow
With some fascinating sort of
Passion
But not always the kind that I understood

And despite believing that your interest was genuine
I sometimes wondered if you got as much of a rush from
Holding the curves of that wooden body close to you
As you did from thriving on the attention that you got
When people saw that you had the skill
To manipulate something ordinary into something unique.


And I’ll admit
It got into my head
And caused me to fret

Refraining from over-analysis
Has never been my forte.
But somehow we always managed to bridge the gap
That our differences created
And accented the qualities that really made us harmonious.

Hoping you would not hesitate to
Pick me and
Bend me and
Guard me and
Let the notes ring loud and frenzied and
Place your hands
Along my neck
To let me be the fine-tuned
Instrument
Of your affection.

With lungs andante
And a heartbeat accelerando
I’d leave it up to you to conduct
A tempo.
While the melody lead us
In an entanglement of musical phrases and lyrical nonsense
That all came together.

I suppose.

But don’t ask me why,
I never understood music theory
I just know what I like to hear.

“We” are becoming a game

A game of Hide my feelings
And Seek your touch

A game of Memory
While you memorize my curves
I memorize the curves of your smile

A game of ring around the truth
and let the thought of being together fall right down
my cheek as I cry from your words of
Guess Who doesn't love you

“We” have become that Puzzle
With the pieces that all look the same
And I’m not sure if our pieces fit together

One of those puzzles with the pieces that look like they’ll fit
But you won’t know for sure till you finish
But you aren’t sure you want to try hard enough to find out

A game where you Chute me that look
And I start to climb the Ladder
Even though I know I’m gonna have to slide back down eventually

A game where I constantly think about the sweet Candy that is you
and Land right back into reality
Knowing you’ll never get the Clue
And I’ll be the one who is Sorry
Even though I should have known you were Trouble all along

I’m starting to learn that this is Life
And the War with myself isn’t worth it
It isn’t worth
feeling like the Paper
While you are the Scissors
when really we are both stuck under this Rock

We just keep calling for Red Rover
to send sanity right over our way
so we can finally figure out the Monopoly of
Forged seduction

I’ll just continue to Go Fishing for the words
to unlock our mystery
so we can finally Connect
our Four arms together

‘We” are becoming a game
Where we are constantly Tagging
each other to be the one to say It first

A game where feelings are Cooties
and we have to Circle our brains
to find the Spot
Where we find out if we even have a Shot

You’ll just keep making me Tick
While I try to find a way
to Tack a label
Toe how I feel

Until I realise this is just Child's Play

Confessions of a Goody Two Shoes
At least that's what I had always considered myself
But like a pair of sneakers tied together and thrown over a telephone wire
I'm sure it's only the innocent eyes that see the image without subtext
Strung up by knotted laces tied around the tongues
Hanging just above the mist and missing the point
Because these shoes were made for walking
And there's just no way of knowing how far someone is going to go
As muddy soles beat the ground with every stride as we run from our problems
But can't always outrun the bullets
Trying on everyone else's lives to see if we can finally complete the mile
I've been starting to doubt the label assigned
Associating me with footwear and being walked on
I can feel my arches aching with the pressure of walking in time with the crowd
Of walking to a beat I haven't chosen
Of walking heel-toe-heel-toe left-right-left
Down a straight path
Down a narrow path
There's smoke in the sky from the road less traveled
There's gravel in my shoes from stepping off to peer into the distance
I'm not sure why I want to run away but there's just something about the unknown
Chasing butterflies down aisles of pitcher plants and Venus flytraps
There's something alluring about losing my only pair of shoes in the dust and just running
If I'm not making good choices
I'll make bad choices with conviction
I need to learn to stand on my own two feet but for now
I've been learning to walk barefoot
Because goody two shoes just don't quite fit any more
But I can't seem to break in anything new

There's a poem about you that's waiting to be written
There are words that circle your lips
Falling, slipping, spilling from my fingertips
Into late night confusion and moments of nothingness
You're a page in the center of a book with a prologue that I haven't read
But I'm still imagining the way the ink stained paragraphs would lend themselves to film
Because every story can be told through so many mediums
There's a poem about you that is waiting for the right words
I wouldn't call it attraction
I would call it an admission that having you at my side is oddly comfortable
I would call it a confession that I wanted to reach for your hand a few times
I wouldn't call it more
I haven't been lost in the starlight of your eyes
I haven't scattered butterflies from my chest
I haven't longed for lipstick stains and inside jokes, sharing, and falling apart to rebuild each other, listening, loving, forgetting the past
I don't think you and I are a would be could be should be
But I do think that you deserve something different and that I want to be someone new
Funny how those match
I think that even though you haven't sparked music in my soul
You have poems about you that are waiting to come to light
Because you have ink in your veins to tattoo words on your bones
And you're a table of contents out of context pointing to a chapter left untitled
You're a hardcover book, but not one to bother with the slipcovers
And you've got a spine that's been bent but is not easily broken
You're a story I want to read, not one I'd want to live
But I do want to write poetry about you
Because you're spilled ink that might as well be a Rorschach test
You're paper pages that act like kindling
You're words that shy away from being spoken
Or written
And there's poetry floating through the air that is sure to rest on your shoulders
Because I'm sure that your heart is shelter to thousands of words left unspoken
And your pulse is sewing together the phrases that you never said
But I'll never really know why my hands warmed up at the touch of yours
Because some poems just aren't meant to be written by me
But they're still out there waiting for you