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. |

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.