A Love story
Kate and I lie on the floor
on the hottest day of August
letting the open cups of our armpits
runneth over. She says something
so funny I can’t believe
I get to watch her
saying it out loud, wedged defeatedly
between the chair and the wall,
an elbow draped across her forehead
like a primeval duchess felled
by a tight corset. Did I ever
love you as much as I love her
I wonder then I wonder
if the comparison is a category error
like pitting the checkered silks
of a jockey perched atop
a prize-winning racehorse against
the warm barn where the strong animal sleeps.
Kate says it is impossible
to know whether love is just conceding
to the inherent lovability of another
human being (people she really says
are so lovable) or otherwise
to his insistent adoration, the conviction
of his desire, and of course being desired,
the self seen through another,
or if our gradual acquiescences
are actually just the regular rhythms
of falling in love.
When you announced yourself nobly
unthreatened by our friendship
I’d think: maybe you should be!
Now I think of the banana shirt
everyone found so funny wrinkling
in a drawer while you wear a wardrobe
I can only imagine
consists of a more glamorous
class of produce. I think of you every time
I buy something new. You’ve never seen
me in this shade of blue.
Kate is either falling in love
with a man who plays volleyball every Friday
in a municipal league
or yielding to it. Evenings she trains
across town to watch him
dive and leap in the sand
against the tedious New Jersey skyline and when
I miss her I walk her dog to the plaza
and back, ping ponging along the boulevard
dodging electric bicycles
and jurassic women impossibly
pushing grocery carts with tiny claws.
My baby, I’d say when you got home.
It was like reciting lines
for a play we performed night after night
to a rapt nocturnal audience.
How the best actors really feel
the rote emotions of their characters.
When you crossed the room
it was like all the hand-painted figurines
on the edges of things
returned to their safe right places
on the shelves you built for them.
Now I’m just being dramatic.
We’d finish the scene just as it was written
and curtsy ourselves to sleep.
town crier
In the front seat of a Jeep the city shrank down
to its two AM tears of light, an empty
freeway, air vents staring
out at me from the dash. I wanted
to rest my feet there but did not.
I was drunk and talking a lot as is
my petulant, glittering wont.
Ben drove and I wondered
if he wanted to sleep with me.
I wanted everyone
to want to sleep with me
and almost believed they did but I feared
such arrogance would bloom
the nuclear mushroom lying dormant
in my secret imperial soul so I lied
about wanting and I lied about believing,
I was never not lying
actually, whether flirting or lint rolling
or calling a cake a cake.
You were never that interested
in discussing negative capability
and I loved your certain
loose ease. I watched Ben’s young face
against the convolutions of fast streetlamps
and took too seriously my mission
of precisely answering
what was meant as a very casual question,
yet again. Earlier at the bar
it was really Kyle I wanted
to take me home but he was preoccupied
by a brunette with a beautiful triangle
of her stomach exposed
to the pale rotations
of the disco ball. Jo said maybe
you should take your hair down so I took it
down. The look of disdain
on Kyle’s face
when I spilled beer on my shirt
seemed proof that not everyone
was desperate to sleep with me, though
that didn’t stop him from doing it
a few times weeks ago,
then sitting on the floor near the door
speaking for a thousand hours
about the sleep apnea
which plagues him and forms
an arid climate inside the huge morning
of his mouth. I’ll admit
I might be writing this poem just to tell everyone
how he looked at himself in the mirror
while he fucked me theatrically from behind.
Or how I wanted to believe every word
you said and almost did.
Lemon. Calves. Cheers. Trying.
Town crier. Ragu. Okay.
Okay. Or still do or want to.
Breakfast. Broom. Come.
Come here. The headlights
and reflective lines made a gauzy plaid
of the bone-dry night and driving fast
I found it difficult to decipher
shadow from real thing.
Emily Alexander is from Idaho. Her poetry has been published in Narrative Magazine, Conduit, and the 2023 Best New Poets anthology, and she has written essays and criticism for The Rumpus, Write or Die, and Cleveland Review of Books. She works in restaurants and lives in Brooklyn. You can find her on Instagram at @emobal.
Photo credit: Plato Terentev