after Frank Bidart
That cold spring night we tripped on acid just off
Mountain Avenue, lay in the makeshift parking lot
outside our dormitory and stuck our sonic tongues out
at the stars, I really thought you loved me and maybe
you still did. We made exquisite corpses, fallen snow angels
green-screened against the ice, and we kicked our legs toward the sky
like birds, like sunflowers, like divine organisms in pursuit of flight.
That was something I could do then, before the sickness
got bad and lead settled into my limbs, before you
decided you were scared and couldn’t do the whole
friendship thing anymore.
Juliana, I still see you in my doorway,
head cocked, hair fried to the heavens from too much Rite-Aid bleach,
wearing your grandpa sweater, always your grandpa sweater.
You say, I guess we all have to get old at some point.
I say, What the fuck are you talking about? You never get back to me.
Juliana, last week I learned you broke up with your boyfriend,
the one who got me hooked on light blue Spirits
and tried to knock the wind back into me two years ago.
I never thought it would happen. Such a sad, strange story,
ours, the way it ended. In my dreams, you are living
in your parents’ second home on the Maine coast, entwined as ever
with your ancestral pleasures. This is what frustrates me.
The white skin, the immaculate body,
the reluctance to look beyond the worlds that have always been yours.
The skinniness and Starbucks and weed habit
financed by posing naked for the art students.
You have legs that work and a body others want to see.
I suppose I am jealous of you. Who can blame me?
I hate him, but he loved you, and I don’t know why you did it.
Why you do all this. Juliana, why the insistence on endings?
Why the object impermanence, why the drunk fuck, why the birds in snow.
I concede I am too soft, and I live in the past, a squatter
in the attic of your part-time heart. I concede I gave you more of me
than you deserved, and I concede we had fun, at least until we didn’t.
Damn you and your doe-brown eyes, your private wash of Scorpio sky,
that beautiful thin figure that has never seen a beating.
Juliana, my insufferable birdcage heart knows nothing if not
the little pieces of you
that deserve some loving,
still. I just don’t know
if I have it in me.
That cold spring night we tripped on acid just off
Mountain Avenue, lay in the makeshift parking lot
outside our dormitory and stuck our sonic tongues out
at the stars, I really thought you loved me and maybe
you still did. We made exquisite corpses, fallen snow angels
green-screened against the ice, and we kicked our legs toward the sky
like birds, like sunflowers, like divine organisms in pursuit of flight.
That was something I could do then, before the sickness
got bad and lead settled into my limbs, before you
decided you were scared and couldn’t do the whole
friendship thing anymore.
Juliana, I still see you in my doorway,
head cocked, hair fried to the heavens from too much Rite-Aid bleach,
wearing your grandpa sweater, always your grandpa sweater.
You say, I guess we all have to get old at some point.
I say, What the fuck are you talking about? You never get back to me.
Juliana, last week I learned you broke up with your boyfriend,
the one who got me hooked on light blue Spirits
and tried to knock the wind back into me two years ago.
I never thought it would happen. Such a sad, strange story,
ours, the way it ended. In my dreams, you are living
in your parents’ second home on the Maine coast, entwined as ever
with your ancestral pleasures. This is what frustrates me.
The white skin, the immaculate body,
the reluctance to look beyond the worlds that have always been yours.
The skinniness and Starbucks and weed habit
financed by posing naked for the art students.
You have legs that work and a body others want to see.
I suppose I am jealous of you. Who can blame me?
I hate him, but he loved you, and I don’t know why you did it.
Why you do all this. Juliana, why the insistence on endings?
Why the object impermanence, why the drunk fuck, why the birds in snow.
I concede I am too soft, and I live in the past, a squatter
in the attic of your part-time heart. I concede I gave you more of me
than you deserved, and I concede we had fun, at least until we didn’t.
Damn you and your doe-brown eyes, your private wash of Scorpio sky,
that beautiful thin figure that has never seen a beating.
Juliana, my insufferable birdcage heart knows nothing if not
the little pieces of you
that deserve some loving,
still. I just don’t know
if I have it in me.
Maria Gray is a poet from Portland, Oregon. Her work has been published by Hominum Journal, Counterclock Journal, Best Buds! Collective, and others. She is an alum of the Adroit Journal's summer mentorship program and Counterclock Journal's Counterclock Arts Collective, where she served as a writing fellow. Tweet her @gariamray.