Do you remember the images from the poems I
wrote? The way I was a deer, and you were the moon, the candy peaches, the
mango strips? The way the light was—not angry or loving, but just there?
Because all i want is to stay with you in this schroedinger’s cat relationship
until the summer, when we can fall apart from each other and each into
something new, like a gilt statue splitting down the middle, and each half
sinking to the glittering bottom of a different swimming pool. All i want to do
is feel the way I feel right before we fuck for the last time, every time we
fuck for the next last time. All i want to do is write about the things in the
ocean, the plant and animal life and all the dust motes slowly making their way
through sunbeams, glinting, skin cells from all the people who were born on
land and died in the water. No one ever tells you not to date the ocean. The
winedark ocean. Scintillating. The things you get yourself into and then can’t
get yourself back out of again. All i want is for it to be springtime at the
end of this endless winter and for this snow to be little trickles, dirty
runoff by the curb, so I can be a new me, and so he can buy short-sleeved
floral buttonups, and wear sunglasses, and make new bad choices with the
whiskey bottles lined up on the bookcase. All i want to do is come into work a
little bit later every day with my beard a little longer, and spend twelve to
fifteen dollars on lunch, facebook stalk my old therapist in the jungle of my
browser tabs and think uncuriously about my mental health, and wonder if people
can tell that I’m febrezing my clothes instead of washing them. All i want is
to sit somewhere on the real grass in the real sunlight, as simple as a line
from a poem in a font with no serifs, and use my phone to check your twitter,
like i’m running my finger along the edge of a hunting knife, the one we used
to pop the top off that jarritos lime we mixed with vodka the last time you
came over, and let your rushing emotions wash over and drain from my body,
revealing my weak spots—the little things i remember, the ghosts of the bruises
you left at the doorstep of my clavicle, the fact that my hair is giving up and
retreating, the way i trot through lives like a horse with blinders on. A horse
that was blind the whole time. All i want to do is make a home for myself in
the sadness you’ve cast off, like a flightless bird making a nest, and watch as
you ebb, like the tide, and find some other rough cliffs to crush yourself
against, just like you tweeted.
Chris Muccioli lives in Brooklyn, NY Alex Manley lives in Montreal, Canada
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