Warming my cold fingers in the ditches
of your knuckles grinning that I’m not
among the dead.
Music plays, cars pass, the asphalt hums.
The # on the dash reads 45°f.
Later on we’ll watch Halloween., I’ll thumb out the doubt,
and tell you about being blind in the cedars,
fairground haunted houses,
that fairy well I found back in Iowa,
what parts to look away from.
45°f, the sun yawns,
dislocates
again.
I promised
when the frost kissed the horse tail,
when I could trace
cartoon ducks into the ice-skin of windshields,
when the leaves changed and the sky turned
itself inside out,
I’d remain and try again.
You’re looking at me, I’m looking back.
***
Andrew Byrds is a queer writer who spends their time disassociating and looking at dogs. They’ve had works appear in Hobart, Philosophical Idiot, Entropy, Maudlin House, Tiny Spoon, and tl;dr magazine.
***
image: MM Kaufman
Rejection Letters 