if your therapist got together with mine,
what would they talk about? Not our dull lives—
far too tedious for an all-day rendezvous—
so perhaps they’d rent a swan boat out on the lake,
pedal into sunlit waves bright as your box-dyed hair,
teaching each other how to unspool and survive
the tangles—minus the professional parlance
for once. They’ll schmooze about the impossibility
of getting good takeout or tattoos in this city,
the brouhaha of flooded rentals, the rumored spread
of avian flu, and I wonder if you still keep pet ducks
or whether you’ve broken into the radio DJ industry
at last—I’m listening but not sure I’m tuned
to the right channel—your voice in memory
is two-toned, a ghost whistle, like bisexual lightning,
the real and remembered blurring together
in stereoscopic waves. Ah, that’s right, waves—
our therapists will be scolded for feeding ducks
bread at the shoreline, the city’s new Earth Day
initiative to improve avian diets, even as they shutter
the sole recycle program, as we burn ourselves
as fuel, so our shrinks will be sourdough deviants
till they hyphenate their surnames and gift each other
car wash vouchers on anniversaries, fight over
turducken versus tofurkey for Thanksgiving
dinner, then finally retire so that I might be forced
to go somewhere else inside myself where I remain
cantilevered by you over a canyon of time,
where we’ve changed in no way at all.
–
Oliver Brooks (he/they) is a poet and MFA student at Florida State University. His work appears or is forthcoming in New Delta Review, Cream City Review, Honey Literary, Full House Literary, 3Elements Literary Review, and elsewhere. He serves as Poetry Editor for the Southeast Review.
© 2025, Oliver Brooks
Halfway Down the Stairs 