pomes

ODE TO ELLIOTT SMITH, ENDING ON THE FIRST SNOWFALL OF 2003

by Hanif Abdurraqib

& when they come for us & whatever is left of our spectral bodies
tells them that were were always as lonely as we were the day we were
pulled from our mothers, thrashing & cold
when screaming was the only language & therefore it was a gift &
not the burden it is when trying to call out to a lover quickly
evaporating into shadows
as your own blood congregates in your lungs
on the day when the knife grew impatient in its demanding of flesh,
six of us piled into the corner booth at twin palace
& emptied our nearly barren pockets so that we could order two
plates of beef fried rice because
if you pretend to love enough
people

you will never go to bed hungry &
we don’t have any money to tip but we leave anyway because other
people’s hunger is not our problem once we are fed & we took
extra fortune cookies &
Kristen’s said Drink up, baby. Look at the stars &
Rick’s said everything you were born with will provide you with infinite
warmth & we laugh at the starless night sky dressed in thick clouds
& how Rick shivers even though it is only October & the air
is not supposed to settle into our bones with knives
until months from now when we
lie to our families about why we won’t
be coming home for Christmas break & Kristen yells
all fortunes are liars at the sky & it answers back
with heavy white powder that licks

at the sidewalks & rests in our hair until we
are covered in this broken promise of stars & warmth
& I look at the discarded fortunes & the broken cookies that
once held them & I wonder if this
is how our parents see us now promising gifts
birthed & pulled from
a loving shell only to grow into another disaster
uninvited & spreading itself along the streets with a
slow crawl & the wind blows one last tiny strip
& it lands on my shoe & says WE ARE ALL GOING
TO DIE ALONE & I don’t tell anyone the truth
for a whole year

YOU ARE JEFF - NO. 24

by Richard Siken

You're in a car with a beautiful boy, and he won't tell you that he loves you, but he loves you. And you feel like you've done something terrible, like robbed a liquor store, or swallowed pills, or shoveled yourself a grave in the dirt, and you're tired. You're in a car with a beautiful boy, and you're trying not to tell him that you love him, and you're trying to choke down the feeling, and you're trembling, but he reaches over and he touches you, like a prayer for which no words exist, and you feel your heart taking root in your body, like you've discovered something you don't even have a name for.

yea i'd like to put the rest of the jeffs here, but that's a trek for another day; it's only this one that's relevant to a blog post i just wrote.