How a love story begins: that bitch
pushed your name to me,
a perfect paper sailboat, and the
first thing I said to you was
“That’s what I want to name my son.”

The end of the story goes like this:
Summer has tipped students out the
library, we are the only two left
on the basement floor. You will stay here
shelving books into their tombs.
In these remains, we buckle,
my knuckles grip-locking you.
This is how to say goodbye.

Like expelled angels falling from the sky.
Biceps tremble into my shoulders so tight,
may the blades weld into wings.
May I fly to you every night,
to resume. On our way to 7-Eleven and
pause over every star. To bicker over
who packs the bowl, who pays for the food.
Plunged beneath your blue Christmas lights,
may we conspire
how our lungs will continue us
till we drift into troubling dreams
on your mattress on the floor. I’d love to
stay, to wake with you sober,
simply speak of what we saw.

Years later our messages to each other are
some kind of fucked up pigeons: I
miss you, I love you, I can’t hear you, think
we cut off. Thinking of you will be a treat,
locked in the teeth. A toothache
of a memory, releasing the jaw that held
Elijah, and cracked it open so often.
I will wish I never met you. I will
wish you and I never left our towns.
I will wish I never heard your name. I wish
you would love you the way I do. I
wonder, how to love someone when
the only words left to say are I miss you.
I love you. I can’t hear you.
I think we cut off.

– Haro Lee