Poetry Stale in Your Lungs by Haze Fry (San Francisco)

​Ten minutes on the balcony was always too short.
Our colorful heads leaned against each other,
mere naive creatures
with poetry on our unwashed hands.
Back inside, chairs were unbearable barriers
so we pressed the metal legs together
and whispered until
we were the troublesome ones.

---

​The teens with the blue and pink hair
always talking out of turn, making time-lapses
on my phone
disguised by my dirty pencil case.
I could watch those videos of us,
of you,
over and over
until you were imprinted on my pupils,
chuckling and tapping your chin
preparing to tell me a joke.
I could look at myself in the mirror
and see you as a part of my irises.

Maybe we laughed together too many times
without smoke drifting from my lips
and it got boring.
You couldn’t handle how I felt safe with you
when I wasn’t putting myself
in danger.
Boring.
Collapsing on bed cushions, eclipsed
by lights flashing around the corners of your room.
Me, soaped in dog slobber,
You, saying yeah to every sentence
with a scarf of weed fumes around your neck.

Some days I wonder how this was ever fun for me.
It could have been
that I felt alive when my blue curls wrapped around your pink hair
like untamed ivy.

Or that you and I
are exactly what highschool looks like.
Spikes around our necks
and worn out boots stuffed with sand from beach bonfires.
You were only excited by me
when your mind was mixed with substances
dragging you through parallelograms
meiosis and mitosis slobbering on your scalp
as blackberries, graffiti, and taxidermied mice
laughed with you
inside your head.
I was never high enough
for you.

​So of course it turned out this way.
Of course I scribbled you out of my yearbook
and my diary is tattooed with pen scratches
each time I write about you.
This isn’t creative writing anymore.
We are no longer poetry,
no longer the freaks in the story
or the protagonists storming through highschool
with an electric punk soundtrack.
I suffocate myself in music
when I see you.
A distraction.
My chair is across the room,
and even though we never decided that this is how it is now
I spend my ten minutes on the balcony
and you don’t even come to class.