Member Poem

we wore gaudish costumes and spoke with
deviled tongues, pressed against my
back your hand with fingers crossed we
fooled even ourselves wearing masks of both
ambiguity and maturity mixing and rising to the
surface like the bubbles in your rum & coke we
fooled even each other wearing my mother’s heels and
your father’s tie we spoke of a future together your
job and my career drenched in wine-stained dreams from the
bottle you bought that morning, echoing through the scratches on
my record player we played house as well as we
knew how to, hiding our emotions like cards behind sleeves and
forgotten under the tables we stacked, we spun our feelings like the
webs we then destroyed, never talking too loudly with hushed voices we
never spoke out of turn we
fooled even me as I grew into my mother’s face I
worried about a future together; your absence clear and your
presence intoxicated and captivating we were
children playing with matches and burning ourselves with
the fire but never learning, we
fooled even who we were before, becoming two people who
spoke in ancient riddles and spoke with the mystery of the
moonlight and cheated the clocks we
grew into each other but we never grew
up. having sleepovers and breaking promises we
pointed at the stars and wished on the clouds that
passed the moon we gazed with childlike eyes at
every possibility that was too high for us to reach but
we grabbed anyway, watching it all crumble and fall
down slipping through our fingers we shattered our own
illusion and tore through who we
were content with pretending to be.