Come Closer - lines from friends and i

I asked some friends to share lines from recent work - with the caveat that they would remain anonymous. It's a cloud of feelings on friendships, the delights of summer, and the stretch of wonder between the teens and the twenty-somethings. Come and sit with us.

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“We don't see you for three months and you call us back to tell us you're a whore?”

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“I step up to pin my sister’s long black hair—

My holy place: 7-ELEVEN—“

-

“this is a poem because i’m sorry about touch starvation as habitual self-immolation. the way a body can burn when it is soft, how pyromanic, how unhuman.”

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“Yeye remembers with the clarity of mud and the sharpness of water—“

-

"Now with each burst, I think

of bodies growing on distant

soil, skin that has withstood

salt and sea, the globe

that Mama’s hands nestled

between my teeth"

-

“and they keep playing these love songs onboard because of course and yes there were days when i was like so fucking lonely but then i kept thinking how lucky am i to experience these things i used to just dream of, like heartbreak and watching movies under blankets and kissing in elevators and holding hands on the beach. not that i’ve done all of those exactly but just that they are so much more familiar than i thought they’d be. and a number of times i just stood over the railing and looked at the water and thought how scary would it be to fall over and drown and then i thought even that is so much simpler than i believed. and that was refreshing.”

-

"The silence between us is stretching 

into time we are out of

I want nothing of romance 

or open-ended promise

I want to feel wanted 

as someone who is here and would be missed 

if she wasn't"

-

“Everywhere we go is battlefields, George. Look around you--they all die, daily, once over. The world is fucked. Everything is on fire. We find the pieces of ourselves that are worth saving and we kindle them back and fuck the rest.”

-

"In this liquid entropy of city planning

and potholes, I want to stand in the tide 

of these observations: the Fenty lip gloss 

left for a loved one on the altar at the Voodoo

shop"

-

“We look out into the city.

It's a beautiful city; it cares so much. Sometimes the fog lifts just enough, and everything is good again.

And people are sitting in this city, looking at the same lights, breathing the same air. And the claustrophobia will swallow them. And it feels not so beautiful.

Sometimes it coughs up smoke. And the women leave their phone on silent and bruise their ankles and keep their makeup on when they go to sleep.”