We are Both of Us in Grave DistressPlaying with animals makes you feel alive. Running from them does too. I'm wearing my t-shirt, and you're wearing my other t-shirt. Some of the wolves chasing you have on matching jerseys. But they are not worse than my ghosts. Some of the ghosts chasing me are repelled by the feeling of having loved me, and not loving me now. Everything in the whole park is quiet at once, except for our running, and then I notice we are in a park I remember from when I lived in Brookline. I want to ask you if this rose garden means anything to you. Is an emotional comet tearing across your gut? I mean to ask. But you're too far ahead, and now you're gone. You with your wolves, leaving me with my morbid ghosts. Then the ghosts stop to catch their breath, and I do too. There is no sound in the park now, and no you. I want to pretend to be brave but who for? I can't tell you. It's too dark to tell if night has erased the whole park and left us here with the ghosts. But it isn't the ghosts which are the problem. It is the dying. It is the distances between us when we do. Kyle McCord is the author of four books of poetry including You Are Indeed an Elk, But This is Not the Forest You Were Born to Graze (forthcoming Gold Wake, 2015). He has work featured in Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Gulf Coast, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly and elsewhere. He's received grants from the Academy of American Poets, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Baltic Writing Residency. He co-edits iO: A Journal of New American Poetry. He teaches at the University of North Texas in Denton where he runs the Kraken Reading Series. |