or fir trees.
Not wanting to be a man with a coffee cup mouth.
Just wanting to be a man
alone somewhere
without all the fuss.
The Most Magnificent Pastime
He said, “I never want to pull out of you”
and I think I fell in love. What a fucked up thing to do.
And this wasn’t supposed to be a fucked up poem
but it’s turning into a fucked up poem
because I haven’t been able to come in three years
without thinking of his hips sliding into mine: like first base,
like second base, like third base,
like home.
Before You Leave Me
The sky has that just before rain smell
and your hands are knotted in my hair.
We are people with arms intertwined
like the pattern on a tartan scarf.
We are people with arms intertwined
almost like lovers hesitant to say goodbye
(but not quite).
There is a warning in the wind whipping around us.
I smell fear on you like a dog
but I don’t say
anything.
We Both Know What It Is
Watch me knock over every cup of coffee
poured in this house.
Watch me rip the pits out of fruit
just to throw the whole thing away.
I don’t know how to be angry with you.
I don’t know why I thought the sound of your voice
could make up for all the bad things
that ever happened to me.
I tried to write poems about your leaving
before you left me
because I was scared;
else to do in your absence.
You have ripped something from both of us
but I don’t know what it is.
I’m sorry I have to lie to make it easy.
Ask Me to Stay
Tell me that you have been dreaming of me.
That you wake up in cold sweats, gulping in air.
You feel like you’ve drowned. You wake up and
still feel like you’re drowning.
Tell me that you’ve spent a great deal of time
gazing at stars, thinking that sometimes things look
better farther apart. That constellations are beautiful
only because we have the space to connect the dots.
Now take it back. Tell me that you’re sorry. That you
know we’re not stars. We’re just people. Tell me that
you know there’s nothing poetic about plane tickets.
Tell me that you want to buy them anyway.
Ask me to stay.
I Swear Somewhere This Works
In a parallel universe or another world
or a different life,
we sit across from each other
at the kitchen table
and go over
the grocery
list.
I Forgive You for Not Meeting Me on the Bridge
You have EXIT sign lips.
Something I want to run toward in case
of emergency.
And everything is an emergency.
Lover, I’m out of bread and milk,
come lay your hands on me.
I’m writing another love poem because
I don’t know how to write about The Bad Stuff yet.
The Crying and The Leaving. The Giving Up. The
way I want to beat my fists against walls and break
words back into my mouth and learn to swallow
everything whole.
Tell me that you feel it, too. Tell me that you have
flooded like the Amazon in monsoon season.
Everything you love is wet.
Everything I love is lost somewhere downstream.
You have seen me through all of my dog days. I want
to repay you with mouth to mouth. With coffee in bed.
With nights spent next to you. I want to repay you by
stealing all of your blankets and wearing your shirts
and keeping the AC on all winter just so I have an
excuse to stay close.
Before I met you, I never would have let anything
get this far.
That is the “love” in this love poem. I took your hand
and wanted to walk out onto something unsteady. I
wanted to take the leap. The jump. The fall from a very
tall building. I wanted the mess of it. All of it.
I wanted you in your slippers with the dog
you’ve had for eight months and still haven’t named.
I wanted you. You and your Californian fault lines.
You and that coffee cup mouth. You and those hands
made for cradling fruit and steering wheels and the
phone and me.
I don’t know how to do this.
Me.
I don’t know how to walk away from you.
Maybe that is the blessing in all of this mess.
Maybe if you came into my life to teach me one thing,
it was to hang up my running shoes for a while.
Not just to want to.
I keep thinking of when we met. Long-distance
phone calls. Those nights you used to lay on
your bedroom floor in the dark and I would muffle
my voice with pillows and blankets, hunkered down
in my own bed. We would talk until the sun was up here,
but three thousand miles away, you were still
I guess it’s still like that. You are far enough behind
to love me but not be able to say it. And I have been
far enough ahead to see the end of this. Baby, it doesn’t
look very good. Baby, at some point it just stopped
making sense.
I don’t know how to be angry with you, but my pride
demands I figure it out. It is so easy to make monsters
out of the people I have loved, to pick up a pen and
write “THIS IS YOUR FAULT” until the page is full.
It is easier to make myself the monster, to snap and bite
and run and hide. It is easy to bare my teeth.
It is harder to be honest.
Nobody here has claws or sharp teeth.
I am not the bomb and I am not the city where
it went off: buildings crumbled, everything ash.
The casualties are not my fault, but the aftermath
is a mess.
Sometimes things don’t work.
And that’s it.
We ran around the wire. A tin can telephone
stretched as far as it could go without breaking.
And then it broke.
Acknowledgements
This little book has received a lot of help and the only reason it’s come to fruition is because a couple of other people have offered up their love and support consistently during the process of writing all of this and then stitching it together into something coherent. Affection and absolute gratitude to:
Caitlyn Siehl for the late night text messages and
for reading this mess before anyone else; Fortesa Latifi for checking in on me; Emily Keenan for just existing in the world; Rachel Drummond for knowing the whole story; Krystle Alder for putting up with all of my vague design requests and still coming through with something lovely; Clementine von Radics and WAYP for giving this book its first home—
& you, for reading, always.
About The Author
Trista Mateer is a writer and poet living outside of Baltimore, Maryland. She believes in lipstick, black tea, and owning more books than she can ever possibly read. Th
e author of two collections of poetry, she is also known for her eponymous blog.
To find out more, write or visit her on Twitter @tristamateer or at tristamateer@gmail.com.
See more work at: tristamateer.com.