Look at me –
I look so good
in this shirt
you gave me,
not like every other
village bear
holding his iced
coffee, searching
for the next
love.
It’s three o’clock,
and in this heat,
I could eat
the whole
grapefruit
of the afternoon,
knowing that today
you’re in Sicily
or possibly on a ferry
and tomorrow
I’ll be in Cleveland
and maybe one day
I’ll join you in Sydney
or maybe I won’t.
Maybe we’ll never
find ourselves
again in D.F.
or Park Slope
with its friendly cabbies
and its canopy
of birds.
Time is like that,
time rearranges us
like guests
in a crowded
apartment, sometimes
standing next to
each other,
sometimes
next to the ugly
curtains – I’m not
how you left me.
I’ve become
a person who
pets the orange
cat and repeats
the usual news
and cries a little
at unremarkable
movies and the
sudden greenness
of the summering
maples. I never
cried before. But
inside this shirt,
now I do, I do
get a little thin
just from listening
to the trees crash
into themselves,
from wearing you
around
all the time.
Nico Amador is a poet, educator and community organizer living in Vermont by way of Philadelphia and San Diego. His poems have appeared in Poets Reading the News, Poet Lore, Bedfellows, Plenitude, Nimrod International Journal, APIARY Magazine, and are forthcoming in Bettering American Poetry, Vol. 3. His chapbook, Flower Wars, was selected as the winner of the Anzaldúa Poetry Prize and was published by Newfound Press in 2017. He is an alumni of The Home School and the Lambda Literary Foundation’s Writers Retreat, serves as poetry editor at Thread Makes Blanket Press and helped to co-found the Rogue Writing Workshop of Philadelphia, which provides workshop instruction with accomplished poets to those writing and learning outside of academic institutions.