Notes on how to stay in love
Go days as if you swallowed your tongue.
Subsist on stale crackers, buy zinnias
with pocket change, spend a paycheck
on parakeets and let them go
in wreck-stopped traffic.
Open the windows of your apartment at dusk
and listen to sprinklers whisper to concrete stoops.
Steal vowels from a Scrabble game
and drop them down a crawdad hole.
When desire cools like August parking lots,
drop ice cream on the weedy cracks,
let your wanderlust fade like plywood billboards
in the tree lines near muggy southern interstates.
What I know about love could fill a peanut shell,
a dimpled thimble on a bedside stand,
a rumpled hide-a-bed or the graceful curl
of a sleeping hand. Let the movement be like sugar
from a cat-spilled bowl across a Sunday morning table.
Do not clean it up. Let your forearms
grow sticky with its presence.
Brent Fisk is a Kentucky poet whose poems have appeared in Rattle, Prairie Schooner, Cincinnati Review, and Southern Poetry Review among other places. Brent has received four Pushcart nominations and an honorable mention in Boulevard’s Emerging Poets Contest. He is also a winner of the Sam Ragan Prize from Crucible and the Willow Award from Willow Review.