The First Poem I Ever Wrote

Poets share some of the first pieces they ever wrote- in their raw, organic forms.

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This Is What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

A title borrowed from Raymond Carver.

It is one lover calling to another, two mouths eloping to meet each other in the middle of a bridge. Low, flat, your voice.  

        And if I’m no good? 

I know. 

       Reassurance, which comes automatically, in the form of back stroking and a lot of crying and muffled congestion. I spend all my quarters at the tollbooth to listen to you hum children’s rhymes underneath your breath. Whole hours are chopped into smaller and smaller increments as we talk. Dollar bills into pocket change, the hum of an ATM, grief becoming smaller grief. 

        Over the telephone, I am calling you. Mother and daughter, a language notoriously hard to speak.

I am thirteen years old and lost in a grocery store. Bit late to be doing that, you say. Let me talk, I say. You shut up. That too, is a form of love. 

The streetlight is a round moon, lending light to the tiny stars of flecked rainwater on my window. Rainwater which has no light of its own. 

       Maybe you don’t have to be the sidewalk. You can be Japan, uncertain and full of rambling train lines that go nowhere 24/7 like convenience stores back home. Then I would ask you, how was it being Japan? And we would laugh about it while watching the eleven o’clock news.

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