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

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