FOUR WINDOWS
1. I’m in the BART station bathroom using a perfume sample that smells like the dry grass of foothills.
The heavy rail of years doing what years will.
My hips pushing the exit turnstile,
I’ll take a breath of hot and golden air
just as the sun goes down. My favorite place
is three stops before wherever I’m going, staring out
the window at the foothills I thought I can never do everything and it kills me.
Planets orbiting just far enough apart
for their sleeves to sometimes brush.
2. Guilt dream where I’m caught sneaking across your parents’ yard. Where I’m on my high school retreat trip with everyone I currently know. Another dream on a train: I kiss the wrong person. I say goodbye to my high school boyfriend on the subway platform on his way to the airport in real life he’s married now, I see on my phone.
Something’s always gone missing. Days of the week
slip past the bouncer in grey disguises. The answer isn’t wrong, but it’s never the answer I want.
O adoration that solves all messes. What billows
from the smokestacks so thick it almost stands still
as the bus coasts through swamplands and layers of fog.
3. Back in the city the neighbors’ party music
keeps drastically switching genres until it stops.
Something inside gets knocked over, then it’s quiet.
It rains hard for five minutes and ceases just as quickly.
Unfortunately my gender is other people’s desire.
Our sweet misbehaving visual cues. We just keep saying I was so young and stupid back then as the years
keep rising into smoke.
4. so dark outside can't tell whether i’m moving or not my world, divided into blocks & stations
i'm going to build somewhere to live & take
all of you with me
//
Elliott Sky Case is a poet, arts & culture writer, obsessive song repeater, award-winning boyfriend, multimedia artist and zine maker under the name Dank O’Hara. Their writing can be found in The Fruitslice, Hot Pink Magazine’s Bisexual Issue, Metro Silicon Valley, and elsewhere. Elliott was born and raised in California, holds an MFA in poetry from New York University, and lives in Queens with three other trans people.
