I got the post-doc and you
got the external dissertation fellowship.
Then waiting. Then late summer
breeze carried by sunlight.
We saw an outdoor concert,
ate barbeque we knew came from
the back of the bar’s freezer.
There was the youth-y boy
who wouldn’t stop talking
to you. The one everyone saw
at all the bars, had a reputation
for hitting on every dude. Every one
except me it seemed. He looked
at you and shared his coke,
probably thought I was passive-
aggressive after we all snorted it:
I went on about how sick I was
of Madison, and its vapid, empty
hipsters with their John Deere caps
even though that described him.
He brushed me off to talk to you
more as the band played the second-
half of their set. You said it was all fine,
but I stand by my rant. He didn’t
remember any of it when I apologized:
I wasn’t angry, the coke just hit hard.
He said: Um. Who are you?
Did he write me off as uninteresting
or did he, by instinct, know I am not
operating under an equation
of desire that yields a hook-up?
Did he see me as a rock
unmoored in the stream
to which every current
is just a mere brush?
Did it matter? That night
you held me tight and I wondered
if you could show affection like this
to just anyone, and if you could
I loved you for it.
Anthony Sutton resides on former Akokisas, Atakapa, Karankawa, and Sana land (currently named Houston, TX), as an Inprint C. Glenn Cambor fellow at the University of Houston’s Creative Writing and Literature PhD program and is Managing Editor of Gulf Coast: A Magazine of Literature and Fine Art. A winner of the 2024 Inprint Marion Barthelme Prize in Creative Writing, the author of the poetry collection Particles of a Stranger Light (Veliz Books, 2023), and co-editor of Tom Postell: On the Life and Work of an American Master (Unsung Masters, 2024), Anthony’s poetry has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Texas Review, Zocalo Public Square, the anthology In the Tempered Dark: Contemporary Poets Transcending Elegy, and elsewhere.