The Poet, in Love, Gives the Game Away
I became a poet so I could hide
behind the truth. Honest, I did.
I didn’t want to let you in on it, but I will:
the speaker is the poet’s perennial excuse.
The speaker spent a year peering out windows
for a red minivan, not I. The speaker
adopted a dog to walk by your house
morning and night, pretended to forget
how to unsend a text, passed out on the couch
with a spilled White Claw (they are trying
to lose weight)—the speaker generously offers,
to everyone involved, plausible deniability.
The trick—and you can trust me because
I don’t have to tell you—is to mix in
a bit that beggars belief: I’m so over you,
I had a threesome with a ball-less cowboy
and a double amputee. (Incidentally,
this is true—we are allowed,
after all, to be more than one thing.)
Yes, the speaker always gets up
to some mischief or other, so there’s no reason
to be coy. I became a poet to redeem your devotion
with beautifully crafted lies—see
how they can be so self-aware? So disarming?
The Rumor
is being passed around, but no one will tell me what it is. I can see from their averted gazes it’s about me. Shunted from hand to hand, it shifts shape, always opaque. When the car arrives, the driver clearly knows I crave self-knowledge; I beg, but his mouth is a sieve that strains the meaning from his words. I collect breathy vowels in glass vials that clink in my pocket as I climb the stairs. I’m on the roof. I am about to leap when I remember how a homeless man in Paradise, as I pressed a penny in his palm, told me: Make way! Make way! Make way for the peal of the bell! The driver hangs his head in shame. The bar’s patrons, having drunk the city dry, wander dazed into the breaking daylight.
Joshua Zeitler is a queer, nonbinary writer based in rural Michigan. They are the author of the chapbook Bliss Road (Seven Kitchens Press, 2025), and their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, Foglifter, Anacapa Review, Pine Hills Review, and elsewhere