Doritos

[wpaudio url=”/audio/8_4/Jaffe.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″]

after Cassandra Gillig

We had a great run but everything got fucked up and flooded, and you know that. There wasn’t any place to go so we sailed, you and I. I said, I love you. Baby, we’re the last people on earth. I smiled a big, unshaking hands smile and I said, I can really see us repopulating the earth. I am in love with you and we can go anywhere. Here we go to it now. I lowered a serious voice and eyebrows from thick hand over hand cables hanging like clothes from dresser drawers, loafing from our hoisted sail made from bags of chips that spent all day firing back light at the sun like they were both pretend outlaws who needed to go to bed soon, and said, we’re going to have to make all the doomsday TV shows we ever loved if we’re going to be entertained right. Our boat was like a couch facing the right direction. Baby, I said, I am so in love with you. I’m sorry, but I don’t feel the same way about you, you said. I struck the water with my palm. The gravity circled nodding around the little time we were spending on earth. Candy wrappers floated by. Books broke the surface like waking hands of the sickly, then spread like unwatered tan plants reaching for the sun out of reach in my old apartment when I lived somewhere. The water threw up colors. Dishwater milk white foam. Wooden kitchen counter cayenne pepper dust orange red. Black plastics from broken road tools from the shadow snuggles of unlit car trunks we emptied together. The colors of the water were just measures of ourselves we dumped into it. But when we aren’t together, don’t you get that feeling, I said, where there is a sinkhole inside your stomach and everything drops into it and you listen for a sound and don’t get one? People know people by hearing if they’re there. Don’t you feel like there’s this big no-zone and you can’t see into it and you can’t fill it? I do, you said, but I feel that way about someone else. Are you crazy? I yelled. Are you fucking stupid? The cables lowered again: it is so pathetic to hear you talk like this. What are you thinking? I was crying, then you were. We made more water to offer to the water. There was a very long pause that was many phases of the moon, and we weren’t the water, we were just on it, not invited, not given. I’m sorry, I said. I’m really sorry about that. It’s just that I really like you, and also that we’re the last people on earth.