Act One
You love riding
with the windows down.
I hated it.
But then I rode
with them down
without you,
and I understood.
Coming back from a place you once had said
was the “scenic route.”
Now it’s really more my route than yours:
does that make you mad?
I drove an extra twenty miles
just to take that exit you took me on
when there was a crash on the highway
to see if I would cry when my wheels came to a stop
at the stop sign.
I hate having to stop.
Even though see saws are a thing of the past,
I’ll return to a warm June evening when
my brother and I have walked
to the local elementary school.
We seat ourselves on opposite ends,
hold onto the metal handles
and rise and descend, one in the air,
the other on the ground, small craters where
other children have done the same with their feet.
We pull out tangerines we’ve stashed in our
windbreakers, peel them in unison,
one of us suspending the other, trusting a smooth descent.
Away from home with imposter syndrome
Fading far from the plight of perfectionism
Taunted by the unexplored, not on any exec boards
Sometimes struggling to just get out of bed
My roommate wakes up and runs ten miles
While I have clothes heaped in piles
And a hundred unorganized files on my desktop
Too anxious to answer an email
In constant comparison and competition
I’m not motivated by grades or majors
Student governance or unpaid labor
But paranoid I need to fit in
Nacho table, extension cords, a locket
lost in the couch. This house crept up
on me like a new year: it was judiciously
January when one day I woke up
to December frosting hello on my window.
When I moved in, after a summer spent inert,
the floor was covered in dead crickets and dirt.
Now there’s unpaid parking tickets, fostered pups,
half-melted candles on the window sill. In this house,
I never want to be on my own, or still.
When the second-floor bathroom leaked
It’s hard
To not see the bad,
To not try and tune it out.
To smile and commemorate momentous occasions
On land others were brutalized on.
The approach, I had been told
Was to tune it out.
Pretend nothing had happened.
That worked well for the boys in my politics discussions.
Not for me.
You cannot tune out the brutalization of the enslaved peoples,
Peoples that built The Lawn.
That built Jefferson’s University.
The weatherman said we were going to get a good seven or eight inches of snow, but as I sit here and write, all we have is rain. I guess rain can set the pace better than snow, though, as it taps on the window, in beat with my fingers tapping on the keyboard, my pads connecting with the clear silicon cover I put on last August. My keyboard covers never last long. I’m not sure if I want to type quickly, or if I just hope that getting my thoughts out fast enough will make this pandemic and this phase pass by with less ache.
