Photo by Pablo Fernandez
I think I’ll eventually forget you,
cross your number, throw keys in the meadow
by the roads you walked, dressed in black and blue.
I’ll not think of two bumpkins who hitched to
the cities, left their coastline to erode.
I’m sure I’ll forget you, all about you—
every drunken detail, like when you blew
up, sold my records to scrape by. Also,
the roads you walked off, dressed in black and blue.
Like immigrant scum stood in welfare queues,
pawned my mom’s gold for daily joints. You rogue,
I’m sure I’ll forget you, all about you—
plastic bags, how shitfaced you’d get on glue,
hair like rooks’ nests, loafed around the metro
in that jacket I saved for, black and blue.
Even dead scrape the barrel, I assume,
and how foreign words stand out odd, alone.
I swear, I’ll forget you, all about you,
how you bled on tracks, dressed in black and blue.
Andrea O’Rourke’s poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in The Missouri Review, Barrelhouse, Raleigh Review, Slipstream, Verse Wisconsin, Poet Lore, and elsewhere. She is the 2013 Robinson Jeffers Tor Prize Winner. A native of Croatia, she lives in Atlanta, where she attends the MFA program and teaches composition at Georgia State University, translates, and paints—oils on cotton paper and acrylics on canvas.