Why Am I Like This
And you say that you don’t remember
what it feels like to be cold, so I turn
into a pane of glass, and on one side it’s sleeting
and on the other there are dozens of boys kissing
and you won’t tell me which side you are on,
so I beg you to insert me into every memory
of every party you’ve ever been to, please,
I’ll become a fizzing can of ginger ale and spill
all over the carpet that I had stained last week,
ruining everything we stand on, like my body
has thin magnets sewn into the stretchy parts
and stiff parts, and you didn’t ask to be made
of iron and nickel, shimmering cobalt jewels
in your eyes, a pull you’d rather not feel, and
at night, in bed, with the laces on my lips
tightened up, you sink away, orbit a planet
less lonely, some body with less gravity,
how you fall asleep quickly and say
it’s not about wanting to shut me out
but you dream about clean dishes
and dry sheets and I am a hungry
dripping monster and then
the recycling truck drives
through the alley and
you say you have to go
check on the bottles
and boxes.

​
168 York Street Cafe
The air outside is April. It has been

two months since the boy’s sensation
of waiting arrived, a single queen
in the deck that never

quite fit the right hand.

Down the street, through a window level
with the sidewalk, he looks in at each
face smeared with slick powder.

The boy gets sidetracked. He forgets

how to align his words in the shape
of a siren, his composition pulling towards
an open mailbox that never closes.

Imagine him coming back. Imagine the end

of this feedback loop, the desire for a bridge
mitigated. The boy pours his late spring
into wide open arms

that unlatch the midnight window.

Take his night and construct an overpass
for your highway. Look how it glows blonde
at distance, the heel of each shoe sounding out
the click it calls home.
Picture
Rob Colgate is a Filipino-American poet from Evanston, IL. He holds a degree in psychology from Yale University and is currently pursuing his MFA in poetry with the New Writers Project at UT Austin, where he serves as the nonfiction editor for Bat City Review and is working towards a certificate in critical disability studies. His work is featured in Best New Poets 2020; his first chapbook, So Dark the Gap, was published by Tammy in March 2020 and won the 2020 ReadsRainbow Prize for Poetry. You can find him at robcolgate.com.