GUNFIRE FOR HEART WITH INITIALS
COLE PRAGIDES

We met in the amber shadow of the eraserhood, 

that central, coin-operated, deep rusty breath 

 

of the city. Bound by rivers neither of us would swim in, 

I marched in mid-day protest, you ran around the cemetery 

 

counterclockwise. You were better at endings than beginnings. 

I wasn’t a good dancer but was learning 

 

two bad things at once — kissing and gunfire. 

Two bad things rang out those summer nights, 

 

touching the most beautiful part of your body: 

where it hurt most.

 

We spoke like children reciting solfa: freehand, clumsy, 

intuitive. My hands found you 

 

like a balustrade covered in virginia creeper, blushing 

crescents. Falling as the moon embraced the sun for the last time 

 

in two decades. Our age when we untied violet balloons 

from our wrists and let them float between floor and ceiling. 

 

The anemochory of your life chipping like the wall 

that fell away in your mother’s apartment, the space we fill

 

with a “+.” We found each other and kissed 

at the protest sometime after the flag burning and before 

 

the gashes and kettling. There is no way 

to disprove our hands from each other. 

 

Soon I won’t be able to read your face but trust me, 

the wrinkles to come will be a full palimpsest of joy. 

 

Gunfire, empty all the winds between us. 

Gunfire, I know you as the sound of people 

 

begging for shooting stars 

and wishing on what’s left. 

 

We left our heart in the cement with initials, 

the echo of our amber, violet, gashing, bad, bad things.