Member Poem

If you look hard enough you find them,
in puddles and in headlights
you see the city replaying its scenes.

It is years before we meet
before you let hair drape
like idle strands of sun sauntering
into lived in, life-full
looking-in rooms.
It is years before
so we pass cold-eyed,
each needing nothing from the other.

Or it is the thought of us harboured
in the red of the window.
The new people in our seats
may feel the air different,
a strange slant of light if for a second
they pause in their pulse.
We are held in glass
like a river that never
broke into pieces,
like a river that never
broke its back in places.

In rushed neon,
a drawing down of lids to tears,
the city relives us.

On the park bench
between those worthy of bronze words
and a dash between two certain years–
where we never leave off,
watch our voices torture the air,
invent our own continuous season.

Published in Twenty-Two Twenty-Eight