“Confession for Brian: I Still Listen to Taylor Swift, I Never Got Any Better at Chemistry”

This poem appeared in Open Minds Quarterly in 2019

You used to spend the morning learning 

about combustion, told me that one day, you’d know

enough to put a person back together with nothing

to work with but the scraps. I spent Saturdays

fending off a loneliness as relentless as tide. I never

thought about how the water came for you, too, on 

the boy’s side of the dorms when the girl you liked

from your chemistry class slipped herself into a suitcase

for someone else. You and I watched a music video 

together in one of the classrooms after hours. In it, Taylor

falls to her knees, and you said that you thought you could

help her stand up straight again and I didn’t say, Let us

figure it our for ourselves first, though I saw how you

hunched. I learned too late to worry. On nights you wandered 

off alone, I never asked where you went, your leather jacket

like oversized armor that you would never grow into,

some melancholy music in your ears, smoke filling 

and unfilling your lungs like an empty threat. In dreams since

your suicide, I’ve seen your distorted shadow stretched across

train tracks like a racked man. Again I’m trying

to hold the pieces of your story in my hands, stained

with your goddamn ghost, leaving your marks on every poem

I start to write. You didn’t believe in heaven. I didn’t know 

how I would find your addiction to sadness in lovers and mirrors

in the years after you let the elements take you back. No one

told me what happened to the ashes. At your funeral, when 

the Pastor led his mourners in “Amazing Grace” I stifled

laughter, wanted to raise my voice in the words of “Back

to December,” a song that’s since become hard to swallow,

turned to a sour grit I can’t bear to let fill me and wear me down.