There was nowhere else to wait until the cinema opened.
Too hot, even at dusk, in the Praise Christian Fellowship parking lot on Beverly
with its blue-and-red neon cross. Perwana lowered the windows halfway.
Potato tacos, September wind, and amusing dialogue about what our boyfriends did.
My mind slid down toward youth, and distilled tonic drinks, by which I mean you,
that morning we sat by the canal
after I had embarrassed myself at a party again.
The pit stains on the shirt you wore,
your pale hands harvesting the label off the beer bottle.
Picture the light stirring between the cars. A reddening of sky,
indigo paint flaked off the metal fence . . .
I can never get over the irreversibility of things, you wrote in your note.
We were friends, and then on a platform in London, against the weather—
icy, anthracite, yes—I sent you off.
Wind muzzled the park with the tree
that April night, years later, when you packed a belt and some zip ties.
No. It must’ve been daybreak. It must’ve been the proximity of something
real and rapturous. There were paper receipts, a police report,
a book for your baby niece. And some calls were prepared and then hung up on.
This is church!
you liked to say about the nights we spent tweaking at the kitchen
table.
We could be everywhere at once with language, traveling exotic voids.
It moved me more than the film, I mean, the waiting in that parking lot—
Perwana’s ruby sweater, tinfoil glimmering on the desert scene, and then the cigarette.