3rd floor dining
Blue haze washes over my throat whenever I put on Is This It
Remember
All the hours out in the city, starlight swimming over all the metal like the kudzu I was worried all my life would eat us all, floating over the humidity like a cartoon bear smelling a pie cooling on a windowsill while we drank tall boys we got from the gas station over by Criminal Records where they didn’t ID long as you paid in cash then stole a bit of bliss beneath the haze out in the historic graveyard full of decaying racists so many among us revered as heroes and the thought of the fury they would’ve felt of gay sex happening the six feet above their oak coffins made it even hotter before we drove home with the windows down letting the low air cooling us off like wild dogs as Julian Casablancas sang of the good old days
as Julian Casablancas sang of the good old days a blue haze washes over my throat
Remember
how gentle your rough hands could be
Delivery Driver off the balcony
Fog of the dead
generations sway beneath
factory lights
I see the spirits
from my mom’s car
as I wait for dad to
come pull up
the flavor of the
Double Bubble
left around the time the last sunlight
dripped down over the pine grove
I learned
long ago
not to tell
anyone
about the ghosts
no one
believed me
& just enjoyed my
“over active imagination”
I tell my therapist
about it years later
& asks
if these may have
been stress dreams
tied to
my parent’s divorce
I immediately start
to weep
so glad
this is over
the phone
3 windows
I went to the beige hell
all for nothing
beneath the death
of all my memories
I watched my dreams bloom &
float away from the bed of lavender
just out my window
I went to the beige hell
all for nothing
beneath the death
of all my memories
fluorescent hum
was my own
funeral march
Clem Flowers (They/ Them) is a poet & low rent aesthete. Poetry editor of Blue River Review. Pushcart nominee. Nb, bi, and queer as hell, living in a cozy apartment with their wonderful wife & sweet calico kitty. Found on Twitter @clem_flowers
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