"I Haven't Seen You in 13 Years and You Show Up Blind and So Do I" by Christopher Citro & Dustin Nightingale

 I give up is written on a bathroom stall at a state university on the second floor of the men's library bathroom with books about French pottery, earthquakes, the novels of Camus. And you and me when we were younger and felt like wet trees every other day of our lives instead of some sort of hibernation, a cicada shell picked off a maple by some short pants boy who hasn't showered in a week but doesn't stink. Somewhere there's a photograph of me lifting one end of a pickup truck above my head. The truck, red. My head, head-colored. The jack, concealed behind a tire. I was 8 and someone was paying attention to me. The photograph took a picture of the temperature too. Which is why I'm outside in clothes that say I might be insane. I'm not. Instead I am so ghost at the edge of the woods I might remember being alive. I pin myself on the wind that smells like the first wind. I can see myself clearly in the outer world now. Which is a start. My eyes are so wide apart they only look at each other.

Christopher Citro is the author of The Maintenance of the Shimmy-Shammy (Steel Toe Books, 2015), and his poems appear or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Best New Poets, Sixth Finch, Hayden's Ferry Review, and Prairie Schooner.

Dustin Nightingale lives in West Hartford, Connecticut. His poetry has been or will be published in journals such as The American Journal of Poetry, New Ohio Review, Cimarron Review, Portland Review, and decomP.

"Honey Eater"

acrylic on wood, 36" x 24"

Artist: Michael McConnell

SaveSaveSaveSave