But this poem’s got no parents

snapped to life, ditched its

Bildung and flooded backwards

over the border to Canada               it has no appetite,

health or grudges     no sour feelings keep it up at night

no autobiography left to compose of glances,

tresses, snap decisions, remarkable

and unremarkable men        water slouching

through a bathroom ceiling in a singular home

Candy a class act when a landscape

painter at pop punk court

I’ll outlast both, and dexedrine, and I'm not sorry

more like you discover melodrama

in the windows of the technically not that rich

Copyright © 2020 by Kay Gabriel. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 24, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.