Today's poem is by Kendra DeColo

Last Night on Earth We Go to Wendy's
       

Starry-eyed and ravenous, we wait for it
to serenade us like a bullet singing to a wound. Is this
what you meant by romance? Me, scouring the remains
of my life over a pool of ketchup, thick as the spunk of creation
while the city blooms smoke, waiting to be swallowed?
Out of everything, I'll miss the oily contents of tin cans. Colored wrappers.
A fig eaten like a kiss in a stairwell. Your lips, potable wishes. The quiet
grace of Aphasia who sells us fish sandwiches, her bright
wand of a smile like galactic fizz orbiting the fryer. I want to make mind-
love, she says now to the darkness. All this glittering space
and no foreplay. Is this what you meant by loneliness? That stiff
feeling in my hips like rust and rain, a surgery that allows
the patient to watch. We are waiting for it
with graffitied hearts, to discolor and gouge the walls
of the restroom where stains blossom into gesture, fingerprints, a deliciousness
hard-earned and wreaking, brought down from the heavens
of grease, and I'm glad for once to have a body with fingernails and genitalia,
a tongue like a squatter's den that knows every violet edge of evening,
to unfold syllables from the book of silences, where we become
gentle, sipping endless refills, and saying thank you, even when it's obvious.

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Copyright © 2024 Kendra DeColo All rights reserved
from Graffitied Heart (w/ coauthor, Ellen Bass)
Slapering Hol Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission