Dobby Gibson

There’s only one horizon, yet it can be found in every direction we look. You’d think it would be easier to get the hell out of here. Just ask an iceberg. In any Chinese restaurant, never order the 42. Never answer your door during dinner, it’s probably another little shit peddling Snickers. Posing behind their windows, the mannequins remind us of their absent stylist. This is all hero worship. This poem ends the same way they all do— list everyone you’ve ever had sex with here:

The neighbors will soon spread their confounding potluck before you. Dressed in period garb, they wear sandals with socks. They subscribe to Life magazine to experience the present as if it were already the past. Their flowering trees were engineered to never drop fruit. Overhead, constellations of stickers glow from bedroom ceilings as souvenirs from a time when life was lived outdoors. All conversations end in silence. The trick is to make it purposeful. It’s not going to get any easier, for these are the CliffsNotes.

You only have to make her one grilled cheese in the suffocating heat of summer while still wearing your wet swim trunks to know what it’s like to be in love. And you only have to sit once for a haircut in the air conditioning with the lovely stylist to forget all about it, and to forget that anything in the universe ever existed prior to the small, pink sweater now brushing softly against your neck. In this world, every birth is premature. How else to explain all of this silence, all of this screaming, all of those Christmas card letters about how well the kids are doing in school? We’re all struggling to say the same old things in new and different ways. And so we must praise the new and different ways. I don’t like Christmas. I miss you that much. For I, too, have heard the screaming, and I, too, have tried to let it pass, and still I’ve been up half the night as if I were half this old, and like you, I hate this kind of poetry just as much as my life depends upon it. They’re giving away tiny phones for free these days, but they’ve only made a decent conversation more precious. One medicine stops the swelling, another medicine stops the first medicine. Just like you, I entered this world mad and kicking, and without you, it’s precisely how I intend to go.