Helium

by Rudy Francisco

I was born feet first and I’ve been backwards ever since.

Yesterday I tripped over my self-esteem, landed on my pride

My hobbies include: editing my life story, hiding behind metaphors, and trying to convince my shadow that I’m someone worth following.

I’m not much of a love poet, but if I was, I’d write about how I see your face in every cloud and your reflection in every window.

If I was a love poet, I’d write about how you have the audacity to be beautiful even on days when everything around you is ugly.

Sinking I held you the way a boat holds water. I should have left when I felt us sinking.

When People Ask How I’m Doing I want to say, my depression is an angry deity, a jealous god a thirsty shadow that wrings my joy like a dishrag and makes juice out of my smile. I want to say, getting out of bed has become a magic trick. I am probably the worst magician I know. I want to say, this sadness is the only clean shirt I have left and my washing machine has been broken for months, but I’d rather not ruin someone’s day with my tragic honesty so instead I treat my face like a pumpkin. I pretend that it’s Halloween. I carve it into something acceptable. I laugh and I say, “I’m doing alright.”

I found you, looking like a damaged wine glass. I hugged your shatter. I cut all of my fingers trying to jigsaw puzzle you back together.

Why Did You Leave? Because you wouldn’t let me love both of us at the same time.

Museum No one ever asks a museum if it’s doing okay. So when you choose to spill like this, bleed like this, cry like this, your pain becomes an exhibit. You hang your trauma on the wall, ask patrons not to touch, but only half of them respect the signs. When you choose to be a poet, you become a place that people walk through and then leave when they are ready.

Love stutters when it gets nervous, love trips over its own shoelaces.

I felt trapped, but another man looked at my prison and called her a church.

I know that we carry guitar cases full of phobias hoping we can turn fear into our strongest instrument,

I let those questions sandcastle inside of my stomach.

When you are the only black man in the whole neighborhood, your skin is that one friend who meets everyone before you do.

Immediately, I could tell he was the kind of man who brings a gun to a food fight.

Jim Crow may have left the nest, but our streets are still covered with its feathers.

The word “repurpose” means to take an object and give it amnesia.

My mother wears her wrinkles the way an ocean wears a wave. She is the only body of water that refuses to let me drown.

I remember taking a deep breath. Trying to get as much July into my lungs as humanly possible and thinking maybe I’d be able to convince it that 31 days just isn’t enough.

even my silence has a spine, a rumble