Anhvu Buchanan

Union

My dreams move in with your dreams and we go tell the organ how to play the mountain. I’m making you breakfast sandwiches by the fire and when you say squirrel I know you mean look at my shirt smiling. You were spitting secrets out again and my question marks aren’t lonely anymore. I want to play within the margins with you. My bottle caps mingle with your bottle caps and we’ve gained another hour. If you say murmur again I might explode and collapse and wake up under smokestacks drifting in my thoughts. If I found us a hammock to live in would you tell me all the things the street tells you at night? My cave is next to your cave and I can hear the water serenading the rocks. We’re in a graveyard of lost socks and all I have is a bottle opener. So we chant theme songs together and it sunsets again. I’m looking for a necklace made from compass parts for the tree you sketched your name into it for the very first time for all the bookstores to call our own. Can you feel the honesty of my time machine? I’m bringing you a meadow and a lake. I’m stealing all the clocks I can to show you age is on our side. My picnic marries your picnic and in the blankets we disappear.

CAMPFIRES

I came to tell you a story. I came to tell you your ghosts haven’t set sail today. That there is a furnace in between the sheets in between our thighs in between our in betweens. You love waking up in strange beds. To open your eyes to a morning you’ve never known. To linger in a canyon of pillows and blankets for the very first time. I came to tell you a lullaby. I came to tell you my hair hasn’t turned white yet. That the color of my skin matches the color of your skin when we bury our hands together in the sand. You love to wear sweaters and count quarters in the dark. You love when I mispronounce my food groups. I came to tell you a secret. I came to tell you rejection will break all our bones. And fear is the creature burning in the fire beside us. It whispers no into our old lungs over and over. We are guitar-less and frozen tonight but the trees are still listening. You tell me I’m the closest thing to a cabin that you’ve ever known as I slowly hum my regrets to you stone by stone until the trail falls silent.

Anhvu Buchanan is the author of Backhanded Compliments & Other Ways to Say I Love You, forthcoming from Works on Paper Press. His poems have also appeared or are forthcoming in Columbia Poetry Review, Cream City Review, The Journal, and ZYZZYVA. He currently teaches for WritersCorps in San Francisco.