Behavior
- Behavior
The last time I saw you sits on the toilet still planning escapeor a piss or to give you forever. You don’t even remember living there.Another point against us.
In Atlantic’s grumbling gut, Q train waits for me to chase you downwhere a woman howls! Interrupts a tourist’s search of the map.Think she must be dying on the gum-pocked floor
until the beat of her hands pressing skirt, legs spread unashamedas a fledgling’s wings. Anguish and sex holler in the same language.You are the one still looking.
Want you under my work costume, suck this blue lace dollar-store braand the only matching panties. The last time I saw youhollers, windy haired. Here it goes again
chucking your airport-shined shoes.You promised to give up what nobody gives up: sleep, money,pitting imaginary girls against the ones who sit on the toilet, loving you.
The last time I saw you scalds then goes icy. No warm. While yousmile loose bricks, while you spill love songsonto her continuous mattress
the last time I saw you mounts anothermoonchrome breastbone. Aimed for the peak of not usand no us. [End Page 41]
Chelsea Lemon Fetzer holds an MFA in creative writing from Syracuse University. Her work has also appeared in journals such as Stone Canoe, Callaloo, Tin House, Mississippi Review, Sugar Mule, and the Mom Egg Review. A selection of her poetry received the honor of finalist for the 2015 Venture Award, and her first pamphlet (chapbook) is upcoming in 2016. Fetzer was born and raised in Minnesota, then on to Brooklyn and Syracuse, New York. She currently lives in Baltimore with her wife and two daughters. She facilitates writing workshops in all kinds of community spaces for people who, like herself, need to breathe that way.
