I’m saying this because you have a new girlfriend and I’ve been thinking about Carolyn Forché
After Brian Russell
about The Colonel, about the ears pressed to the floor. You tried to pierce my ear that one night on the beach. You were so close, then. The smell of your strawberry lip gloss and the fish bodies washing up on the shore. I watched your parents open a bottle of gin through the window and pass my dad a glass as the needle went through my ear. I love you, you said then. What I’m saying is, in another version of this, we were at the park and a mother handed her child his water bottle. Blunts washed up in the roots of the tree we sat under and this was where we faltered, no, faded. In another version of this, you taught me how to drive. We drove a golf cart into a fence and you kissed me anyway and said you loved me. I said nothing back and let you kiss me. In a different version of this, I went to a different school and we never met. We never got high and fell in love and pierced my ear. In a different version of this, I told you I didn’t love you anymore and we unfolded. I said I didn’t love you when we got high in the mangroves, or in the rain, we didn’t make out and make up and move on. We unraveled. In a different version of this, I moved on and you didn’t. On my last birthday, we laid on the roof of your car and watched the stars shift above us. Nothing I write about you makes any sense. You don’t exist anywhere I look for you. I don’t want anything but to know that you miss me. I don’t want anything to do with you. In every other version of this, I never sent you any love letters and I don’t still wear the necklace you bought me. But in this version, really, there’s nothing more I could’ve done. This is only a love poem for what we weren’t. This is only about gin no, it’s about water bottles, and my unpierced ear.
