Breakup, Walden Pond & Double Take by Aliyah Cotton
Breakup
I could’ve done anything. I could’ve
swiffered my room or gone out to buy more milk.
I could’ve gone birdwatching or started boxing lessons
or any of the things I always said I would do.
But I’m smug in my heart.
I couldn’t just let the silence stain my teeth.
I’m one of those Capricorns with too few cavities
and too much pride about it. I gnaw on the last word
like two stale sticks of spearmint gum. And so I called
when we were both too tired. And Jesus
did she let me have it:
“You know what your problem is?
You want everything. You want to be
everything. You want the wish
without the bone and the ashes in your hair.
You want the sun to mean something.”
I could have said anything. I could have
laughed. I could have hummed
the melody to the song
she wasn’t singing, could have
put a shell up to my ear, let myself
believe it held an ocean and
I could have lived in that fucking ocean.
I do none of the above.
“You’re full of shit!” I say cheerfully.
because I love a good fight and
always fight a good love.
Walden Pond
I’m out finding it again the don’t-kill-yourself
This time I’ve brought my friends
and Nana’s old Kodak the kind you hold
way below your heart with hands unsteady
one or both eyes shut
like God deciding
which life to fuck over next
So there we are on the blueberry softest of days
grinning as the leaves chat us up underfoot
Hello to you says my pal Tom
hello hello
I follow his voice through the camera lens
as it scrapes the sky clean above us
ricocheting for a moment
between rows of evergreens and his too-big heart
before returning to us
in wide ripples that drink the pond
Lucky shot
says my pal Winston
watching it all through binoculars
He’s got a song full of molasses
and every so often
it drips onto his sleeve
Later when I pick up my prints
from Hunt’s Photo & Video on Commonwealth
I find that picture of the two of them
It sticks sweet in my hands
Double Take
Tell me the story again. The one where the mosquitoes are biting
and when we swat at them they turn to smoke slow dancing in the
eve and at first we’re scared they’ll ask us to join but then we’re
giddy and we’re laughing forever before we notice the crystals pour
up from our mouths into the sky where they make a pattern in the
stars that I don’t understand but you’ve got a telescope in your shoe
and ask me to bat you up into space and when I do it doesn’t matter
and I don’t miss you because one of the odder aspects of quantum
theory states that when two atoms are entangled they cannot be
described independently of one another even when separated by
large distances and that’s why the leaves fall off when the weather
gets cold and why poems never come when you need them and why
mosquitos turn to smoke when you kill them and that’s why I cry
every time you go from me.
“I trashed these pieces because I don't buy the confidence in the speaker's voice. It feels to me that the speaker is putting on a front, is trying to be a poet. I wish he could say what he feels without being so self aware and without asking for the unspoken permission of readers, haters, eyes, etc....”
Aliyah Cotton is a queer poet of color from the Northern Virginia/Washington DC area. She earned her MFA from Boston University and her work has appeared in Poetry Magazine, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Aliyah lives in Charlottesville, VA where she creates music under the moniker October Love. Pronouns she/her. Twitter @aliyahcotton Instagram @aliyah.j7