Mountain Town
Memory, a tender shuffle of your cards
I’m the coconut-scented pool boy
of everyone’s hearts, softly reaching
for the muck, the fallen dead leaves
it sure is hard to love a man
like you. Grime on all walls, we dove
together in sweet heat, a fond farewell
is how do you do, a donation-based hello
waiting for the crowd to give you some
space. Breathe and tilt towards the gold
pew pleading ecstasy in the decades boulevard
the sensual kiln federal blue night speeding
in a Mayan frieze the retroviral grapevine
is a requiem for unsung underground rivers
we might refer to the “Pennsylvania Climax”
though the serene cashpoint oasis suggests
tears. Makes the city sorta pretty. Cellophane
glued the gingivitis end-of-day valley, inverted
mile getting fucked on the slick diaspora
of a postcard trembling in my hand. I walked
calmly to the edge of you, waltzed
upon the currency of the bus-flavored wind.
Spindled down the faces of our kneeling crimes but
we didn’t call them crimes. We buried ourselves
in the rippling plaza bruised with pigeons
sealed in an envelope of sighs. I fell for it. Just
think: soon we’ll all be dragged under, too—
they'll beat the losers and the singing winners
alike. You were a faggot long before you wanted to be.
Good Luck
But this poem doesn't have me being sick in it, or
lying to my mother about therapy, dirty dishes,
sulfur soap in the shower, phone on hold,
not the NYPD beating up my friends
and I can suck his dick for as long as I want
looking up from the back seat of a sinking Buick
when the game of hide and seek is over and i'm still
hiding? That's a pre-existing condition
no one tells you about. Is that what makes me
an addict, wanting to love everyone at whatever cost?
The sun folding simply over the Taconic
like a forbidden pony, that's the modular form
an epiphany behind a crabgrass paywall
a top who can host, someone to kvell over
It was a grey East Coast memory that we all had
and it feels bad to win, even. Here's the gag
I guess: every vessel sails to ruin
under the gear of the current
machine. Just threads. It's Friday I wonder
what I can steal from work on my way out
-
Ryan Skrabalak's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in DELUGE, The Poetry Project, Stone Canoe, The Brooklyn Review, CLOG, and Slice, among others. He was a contributor to the anthology The Dream Closet: Meditations on Childhood Space (Secretary Press, 2016). He has also authored two chapbooks, most recently Jelly County (Quick Books, 2019). He knows about being crushed and trying to not be crushed.