10 pm in front of Chipotle
and you said, this is my [rusty] Chevy [something],
which had a radio that played exceptional static
for us to tune out on the trek to Mount Washington.
It was raining, but we had already driven all that way
and so we stood outside anyways
in the low hanging clouds above Pittsburgh.
I said, I’ve never been on a date
with a girl before.
And you said, is it everything you thought it’d be?
And with that
we decided to see who could throw a rock the farthest
[which you won]
and who could name more constellations
[which nobody won, because there
were no stars in sight on that Tuesday night].
Then the couple next to us left
and a new one arrived
and the blanket of fog temporarily lifted
to reveal the UPMC logo.
We watched as the number of tiny office lights
diminished, looking a little bit like an end of the world
power outage in slow motion—
and we silently shrunk in the weight of the moment
as the Earth turned and dragged the seconds along,
and the water of the Allegheny and Monongahela
merged into the Ohio the way our bodies connected at the hands;
two posterchildlesbians showing a city
how
to
fall
in love.
first date magic, a homage to a tony hoagland poem i once read