American Chordata: Magazine of New Writing Issue One, Spring 2015 | Page 105

It is your last night on Earth.
I am listening to an opera singer from Berlin talk in broken English.
It is a party. From a glass tumbler, I am drinking bourbon,
and she is asking about my poetry.
It is your last night on Earth. I am unaware.
The party is sitting down to dinner. We have switched to wine,
red and white. The opera singer is a friend of a friend of my lover.
He rests his palm on my knee, and I rest my hand on his shoulder.
About my poems, they are less and less about emotion, I tell
the opera singer. A kind of demonstration of how one idea or image
can always follow from the last. Once there was a man, and then there wasn’t,
I wrote once, remember? You wrote: I am what is missing.
Now the party is full and seated on couches.
I drink spirits poured over a single cube of melting ice.
Now, about moving, the opera singer is asking advice.
It is your last night, I am unaware, and have nothing to tell her.
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