Untitle —
can you remember once when i loved you etta james melted slick with cricket gossip and the silhouette of the bleeding silent city, call it “Detroit: An Opera for Us”- we two on a blanket in that distant great green balcony before an orchestra of city light, call it the only beautiful thing in the world, and
for a moment in the night you were not someone i knew but a voice disembodied, an odd vacant history laid beside me and in my mind i turned your words over like a rubik’s cube, studying how they’d come to where they were. you were more capsule than person and so human that way; inside you was you and all of what we’d known together (separate and so near—). the way that time shifts itself forward was all at once alive in you and i couldn’t believe it; i couldn’t believe that there you were, there you were who you were and next to me.
that passed, and later you made me come. you unlocked me slow and left me on my back gasping and open to the weight of a starless deep orange night, like a sacrificed goat gutted on a grassy alter. moaned confessions hung like smoke. “everything goes away,” i never thought to myself; thank god for the audacity of times which need nothing—
Rosie DeSantis is a theater artist from Detroit studying at New York University, trying to get things published and seen. She is obsessed with her hometown, tiny abandoned things, and the small ways we make what little we have our own.