THERE’S A BEAR BEHIND YOU WATCH OUT!
oh, just joking; ’twas a geothermal vent,
but now that i have your attention would you.
um, maybe, i don’t know,
would you like to go watch a movie sometime?
just you and the poem. i don’t know maybe
this is silly but i think we’d have a nice time, we
could watch the latest superhero blockbuster
while munching on overpriced popcorn doused
in that liquid butter which always nudges its way into the porous popped kernels like a sort of
reverse earwax?
i’d smuggle in mike and ike’s, unless you’re allergic to mike and ike’s, in which case i’d
not smuggle in mike and ike’s and instead smuggle in another candy of your choosing, which i
would purchase from the dollar store beforehand. the theatre would be mostly empty, as
theaters
are wont to be, but there wouldn’t be so few people in the theatre that it’d feel especially
awkward, if that makes sense. my hands would get kind of sticky from the
earwax butter and the mike and ike’s (or similar candy) by the time the interminable flick’d draw
to a close
and so in those final moments, as UltraPerson stands atop the smoldering wreckage of the
city he once called home and weeps and i see the rumblings of a tear form in one or both of
your
eyes i would want to wipe it away or at least hold you in a way but my very sticky hands would
give me
pause and result in my not doing so. and then we’d part ways in front of the cinema, because
we parked on
opposite ends of the expansive parking lot. the poem drives a subaru, obviously. i wonder what
we’d say to
each other in that moment, with the moon obscured overhead by the lights and the sounds of
the city and the
clouds and the unwavering gases all commingling in that large sky.
(By Nate Welsh ’22)