"Elegy"

Emily Bennett

I wonder where those photographs went - if she even kept them. If she burned them: melted the snow and the leaves off the trees, drew her nail file along the record until it looked like crosshatched fishnet stockings. I wonder if she was able to eat avocados, knowing what she knows. I wonder if she also knew about the rollercoaster: my hands so white, hers tan like the end of summer, that night, the rollercoaster. I wonder if she heard me whispering her name off the Ferris wheel at the top. Lighting up autumn skies the way you wave your cell phone at concerts, no lighter because I decided to quit smoking, just in case of the slightest chance for kisses.

I was going to sit on the steps of the Art Institute with a boombox playing "Just Like Heaven" and give her flowers, riotously bright, shrieking with color. We made each other mix tapes on the same day, each of us writing on the label, just because. I wanted to sleep in her bed and watch the ghosts next door through her window.

That weekend, after we'd exhausted the Art Institute, we'd step into a hotel room and the world would turn magic. Stains dissolving off the sheets, shower tiles gleaming, the scent of smoke winging away. The mourning doves on the windowsill, the morning after: fluttering away without a goodbye.

I'm waiting for the day when I find a girl named "Springtime Prosperity" like a fortuneteller, so I can tell her she was meant to be a poet and pretend her love songs were about me. I wait for blindness, for phone booths: because I left her a message but she never left apologies. Somewhere in the phone lines, my heart is still bouncing back and forth.