For You I Would Ruin Myself a Million Little Times
Might Love You
Us, a Historic Town
Didn't Mean It
Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear Until Completely Gone From Sight
For You I Would Ruin Myself a Mllion Little Times
cut away at every facet until I am a rusted sapphire jewel, pressed flower
in your travel-sized leather journal, another lackluster stranger on your walk
to school, I’d wait under the stained-glass lamp in the corner booth, at the café
assuming you’re running a century late and share a chocolate shake
with whipped cream, share conversations even if they feel like a skeleton
of something dead and neglected, that spent its sweet time rotting for weeks
like a bowl of nectarines, grind a maraschino cherry stem between my teeth
listening to you ramble about us like some wreath-laying remembrance
ceremony speech, and grieve, rest our whirlwind to peace, let you bury me
wrapped in a linen summer dress and withered baby’s-breath, next to
cicada molts and flicked cigarettes, like a secret I won’t tell, time travel back
to that mistake again, the way you hold my hand beneath the orange eclipse
that July night then instantly regret it, I wouldn’t change the subject,
I wouldn’t play stupid and let you baptize in the embarrassment,
watch you lower your head on soft blades of green and samara seeds
and never apologize and do it again, I wouldn’t say stop instead
carve a jagged heart around initials on the wooden picnic bench with
my house key, let the dog bark as I fumble to open the door at 2:30AM,
capture you to reference when the moment is 5 years older to admire more
than any museum piece, more than the cherry trees at Arashiyama in spring
How far are we from somewhere we know? Count the mile markers. Morning Sun Road. Might be lost. Might keep going. Might love you. Do the math together at Meijer. Whether buying 10 yogurts or 5 is the better deal. Think about spooning them into our mouths with fresh cut strawberries at breakfast together. Return the cart while you start the car. Click seatbelts. Sit in traffic. Listen to sports radio. Harmonize with static. Might learn fun facts about the haunted bar in your hometown. Say we should visit. Ask more about your living. Where you went to elementary. How you remember your locker combination. Might be intrigued. Might find it weird but cute. Tell my friends about you. Imagine months in advance. Years. Kindergarten registration. Honda Odyssey. Drop-off/pick-up location. HOA meetings. Garage remote clipped to the visor. The loud opening. See it quietly come together. Might accept the invitation. Meet your mother. A drive up north. Smiling. Excited. Past rock slide signs. Narrow underpasses. Water towers. Warwick Road. Winding. Sun. Wild honeysuckle. Mosquitos sucking the blood off our skin. Pull up by the mailbox next to rose bushes. Ring the doorbell. Might embrace at the front door. Nice to meet her. Finally. Nice to meet you and you and you and you. Meet warmth. Say grace at the dinner table. Make a good impression. Smile for the camera. Flash. Feel a part of the family. Feel whole. Feed the dog carrots without anyone knowing. Might love you. Go home. Admire you from afar filling the tank with gas. Hold your hand on the central console. The other out the window. Might follow you in. Claim the top drawer of your nightstand. Vitamin momentos. Turn off the side lamp. Watch you undress the day. Watch the way your body sighs. Bones. Borrow one of your shirts. Lay on the familiar side of the bed. Might be restless. Twist and turn. Sweat through the sheets. Think ‘I want to marry you’ out of the blue. In the dark. Never speak it aloud. Might mean it. Might be tired. Might throw the thought away. Wonder if I did too much. Created too much history. Leave a fossil in your heart. I love you. Might make it if I tried. Might have been forever if it wasn’t so easy to change my mind. Convince me otherwise. But I look over at you, snoring, unknowing. Notice the sureness in the silent stillness. You sleep straight until morning, usually. Not sure. I'll never know. I’ll be gone by then.
Founded: Sometime, early fall, small beginning. We named it “This Thing.” There is the bar where we shook hands on it, triumphant and drunk. There is the shopping mall parking lot where we kissed in my car to David Bowie’s Lazarus. The 24-hour CVS. The bus stop. The hospital. There is the overlook we had a picnic on. Shared mason jars of pink lemonade. Watched the sun fall over the football stadium. Told each other how much we hated it here but promised to never leave, this particular place. The Waffle House. The coin laundry. The Green where we brought camping chairs for a concert and fireworks and said it over the noise. The dog park. My mother’s house that you never saw. Your mother’s house that I never saw. Her vegetable garden I only heard about. Zucchini plants. Those pesky rabbits. The antique shop in the corner across the street. The sign in the window that said ‘Memorabilia and more.’ A space to come home to. Concrete patio. Christmas tree with rainbow lights. A coffee pot. Dishwand in a double-basin sink. Palm brush too. Merlot with friends. Pyrex glass dishes. Home cooked meal by following the internet. Laughs at the table lasting until 11PM. Saying let’s do this again. Looking at each other with a silent certainty. This suburban significance. Getting letters from the mailbox. Hanging pictures on walls. Oakmoss candle. There is the grass hill where things went wrong. The talk, the This Is Not What I Want. There is the traffic light that felt too long. There is the driveway where you dropped me off. There is the haunted post office, Mexican restaurant, koi pond. Anywhere we went. There is the church I thought I we would swear until the end. Watch a slideshow of how it all started. Instead there are cemeteries. Museums holding history. Parks with statues of our faces, saying nothing.
That time I promised in a church pew, the rain, or blurted on a Thursday at a tavern over the bar. It was an accident, I swore. I thought maybe so while on that 9 hour flight. Cheese crackers. Word searches. Movies. Turbulence. We finally arrived to that place. I said it at luggage claim, hesitant. In my defense, I thought this meant always, no going back. I was more confident on a different day, at a Kroger, watching you sniff dry lilies from an assorted bouquet. Buying sponges. Checkout lane and keychain card and total savings. I thought this must be it. Paper bags on the kitchen counter, putting cucumbers away, knowing where everything goes. Almost. After listening to you talk about your small town origin story. Your mother’s marshmallow-ed sweet potatoes. The paint of your childhood bedroom. As we sat in wilderness. At a Jack In The Box drive-thru. On a couch sometime late, after spilling guts and drinks, unbuttoning ourselves, but not entirely naked. Just there, yet barely. I was sure, I spent nights. I didn’t mean how I stayed for waffles and coffee and pleasant conversation those mornings, all the ways in which it felt significant, like a silent forever, some kind of knowing. I wanted to say I know what you’re thinking, and you’re wrong. This was nice, had a good time, might never see you again, but thanks nonetheless. I didn’t mean to remain for so long, enough to share a dog. Socks. A box of cereal. Didn’t mean it, if you thought this was special and sacred. If you asked for blessings, got a ring, hid it in a cabinet, worried about me finding it, planned us all out, perfect and clear in your head. Didn’t mean it, when I said sorry and walked off, because I couldn’t mean it anymore, even though I said I do. I always will, of course. I won’t stop.
Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear Until Completely Gone From Sight
the drive back is the worst part, 75 starts to feel like nothing & the world turns slow-motion, all Lutheran churches & Nazareth hotlines, psychic readings & giant signs that claim the only way to save yourself is by realizing something is wrong when there’s not &for illogical reasons I put blind faith in football lights & parking lots & late-night talks, even fallen rocks & deer guts & crosses with sunflowers by bent-in guardrails, despite us being a last-ditch effort–a shot in the dark–an out-of-control speed car, I still hoped you would love me before the impact, before the body damage, before the silent crash by confession, I believed in you & me & crescent moons, Nulu rendezvous, Sufjan Stevens & gas station breakfasts, vending machines & road head at a rest stop exit, no destination, yet I was convinced we were meant to be more than just this, than a favorite song getting old, a green light turning yellow, Kentucky feeling like Kyoto instead of home, I spent a sad summer in Ohio, tattooed cistus stems above my elbow, broke the silence by combat boots crushing locust shells on hot pavement, by accident, like my ribs breaking into a billion bite-sized calcium fragments when you dropped me off at my front porch & said that was that, by September I headed southbound, solo, sped through mountains & silos & fatal bus crash sites, motel ice dispensers & lifeless men, swam in oceans that burned my open wounds, swallowed salt, forgot about where I came from, spelled out ‘fuck you’ 5 times in the sand with a twig, hoped to send it in a text before the tide came & took it back again, thought about soft deaths, a wine-stained wedding dress & fenced-in yard, wilted rosemary gardens & the bitterness of watching daylight savings sunsets through the water-spotted windshield of my car, thought about what it meant to leave until it’s too far gone, chasing a change of scenery mindset until I was lost at a Love’s gas station in Lafayette crying to my mom, missing birthday balloons tied to a suburban mailbox & empty plaza lots & messing around antique malls, for the longest time, I wanted to get away, far from my childhood bed & your neck, the family-owned root beer stand on weekends, so I left town, played mystery girl in the corner of arcade bars, craved attention from others, but now I am attempting existence from myself, I read Letterbox reviews on horror films to check if I can watch them without somebody else, travel cracked sidewalks & believe in neutral omens when I see you through a record shop window holding a copy of Carrie & Lowell, & I turn onto the freeway with no hard feelings, going someplace better than behind me, west, straight toward the sunset, blowing through my playlists & passing dented welcome signs & condemning billboards every square mile that tell me where I belong, into an unknown oblivion, beyond all I’ve ever known.
Casey Harloe (she/her) lives and writes as a student at the University of Cincinnati. She is the recipient of the Academy of American Poets Prize and the Jean Chimsky Poetry Prize. Some of her work has been published in Poets.org, Short Vine, yolk, and DIALOGIST.
