The Maynard
Spring 2018

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Self-Portrait as an Internal Dialogue on Rue St-Laurent, 2016

I will be tired tonight.



Without ugliness, my date says, Tell me what it’s like to be with you.

The answer is a salt pillar, femme-shaped in a desire I won’t verbalize.



Today, humidity

sealed my eyelids until sundown when I came to in a sundress, kicking
on sandals for altruism and a park bench

gone seed-soft in Gemini.



Staring too long into the ochre glow of Cinéma
L’amour’s Adultes XXX signage,

my date edges tears
but his trigger doesn’t smolder in seduction how you might think:



a college boy fell out

or stag-leaped from tall nearby stories, weathering into the water

down his friend’s chin.



The local forecast suggests I reply
with a let’s get out of here, an automated list of blackout alleys.



After this date and before this poem, an ex sent me the dictionary
definition for assailant.

Onlookers shouldn’t trust that

I can hoist my words’ weight, or predict their ham-fisted cost
before the glossy busted lip.



You’re not young enough to be getting this so wrong could fit here.



Vulnerability bruises like June peaches, picked too soon to sweeten
a wordless mouth.

The forecast dictates: She will be very quiet and it will come across as cruelty.



Power down the app. Proclaim a hydro outage

on our present moment, where my dissociative fugue reads frigid
beneath summer’s chokehold.



I’m sorry you lost him, I reply. Too late, making this about me.

Mercury spins chaotically through Leo.

My date fails to gesture towards its fiery mass, my humiliation
leaping up like a trick candle’s flame.



I’ve started to equate politeness with inobservance.

I’ve started to realize that a life is a vessel for everyone
else’s stories.



And I favor quiet, how it follows the door-click

of a body ceasing the trajectory of any possible night.