In Happy Valley

 

Looking down, I can see everything that comprises your little town, this sacred place in your formation where you have been born and martyred and raised again. There is the bookstore-coffeeshop where we drink our tea and peer out the window at the feet of the passersby. Across the loathsome football field is the high school where you fell into love and its entailing poverty. Your ex-girlfriend, we speak of her while we attempt locked doors and try to climb through windows. We're looking for a way in. But your hallways are barred to us, so we wander slowly back down the paths that brought us.

On the corner is the skate shop, boys with shaggy curls out front doing tricks. I see you tense. "That one looks like Johnny, I thought he was in Texas. He does jumps just like him, oh, I can't see him! Can I stand behind you, will you block me from his view til he goes back inside."

"Babe, it's not him, there's no way it's him. I just saw his face, and it's not him."

You recover. You tell me about your deaf boy, that he taught you to sign and how he smiled just for you. Sometimes, you say, he'd put his hands over yours to keep you from speaking so he could look at your eyes. Those were the times you were most in love.

You tell me how he brought you up five stories to this same parking garage, the first time you'd been. The mountains. The church steeple. The place where he scratched your initials into the rail.

I watch the clouds pass. I examine your face, which is never far from grinning. I find such impossible beauty wherever I turn.

Goodbye poems

 These are for people I won't see again.

1. This is about a boy who was a dinosaur who I loved with every fiber of my being.

There is a boy, gone from this place, who means a
great deal to me. He was that rare friend who
needed nothing. I remember the hardwood floor,
unyielding and creaky, underneath my back on
those nights (my parents would say "mornings") when
we talked and dreamed and pondered. The way the
line made a scratchy noise in the abyss of my
ear; the way we both prepared for the inevitable
exhaustion of my phone battery. I knew he was
leaving, because it was what people did and I had
learned to expect it. But impending separation brought
us closer. There was nothing to lose that wouldn't be
lost eventually, anyway.

2. This is about a girl who made me laugh so hard, with bangs like pretty late-night magic.

His watery eyes, the veins bursting their blue-blood,
And he doesn't resemble his daughter. Blinking,
Bright-eyed, she bounds to unlatch the gate. Wander in.
Watch as she leads me down stairs I've known. Big
Empty space, fill with our voices as she piles cloth-
Scrap after cloth-scrap into billowing recess of plastic,
Wonder at handsome stubble friend eyeing me from
Corner. Oh, do come out and play, won't you, won't
You, oh lurking friend of beauty? She is still
Yours. Magic sweater can't change some things. I'm
Not in all that I'm pretending, watch me disappear.

3. This is about the last person that I wanted so badly I knew it was already over.

Goodbye to feeling my tongue become cotton in my mouth when I see you.
Goodbye to your red glasses.
Goodbye to the way you said my name so deliberately.
Goodbye to your hair.
Goodbye to baking you cupcakes.
Goodbye to the possibly dirty joke you made.
Goodbye passing windows trying to catch a glimpse of you.
Goodbye to the night with the knife.
Goodbye to four shots.
Goodbye to hopeless fantasy.
Goodbye to your name.
Goodbye to writing about you.
Goodbye, grrl.

4. This one is about my last boyfriend forever, the one I will never share an apartment high above the dirty city with.

you were my perfect love best friend brother
who ate my naked legs
and laughed when i kissed your ear
you were something magic i couldn't do without
when everything was wrong
and i wanted to pretend to be someone else
you were my perfect-est love
with your pale skin and your bony ribs
and i don't want anyone else to be you.

notification

I lost my cell phone.

I'm very unhappy.