Irish Proverb

Mind the Gap

I don’t know how to grieve the end of

The relationship equivalent of false pockets—

Promising until you try to go deep.

I thought one of the perks of being gay was getting to wear cargo pants.

A snapped Bossa nova beat echoes through the subway tunnel,

But my fingers feel too cold to join.

 

With today’s footwear I chose to stand tall,

Which I regret by my third block. But,

There’s an Irish poet, she tells me,

Who translates Trust as,

You are where I put my feet when they are sore.

And indeed when I kick off those boots to flop onto her bed,

The radiance in her eyes cocoons my reflection in the stars outside,

And I know that I have nothing to mourn,

For her pockets are large enough to share

Until I find my own.

 

Pushing off side-by-side,

We quickly break the rules of the road,

But the borders of the bike lane were washed out to begin with.

90 blocks north is the time it takes to get where we didn’t mean to go, and

Coasting closer and closer to catch each trailing word,

We lose the charted course,

But find a joint meditation in motion.

 

We jaybike a light and resume when able to claim the street once more.

You worry about risking the friendship by changing the terms,

Especially when so much is uncertain.

Uphill climbs require constant movement forward,

And we don’t yet know where these paths lead.

Possibility

Comfortably closes, as our locks snap frames to fences.

 

"Independence Day" is complicated on stolen land,

So instead I propose we

Go fo(u)rth!

And start the revolution.

 

When your mother sings Dayenu as an elementary schooler’s entertainment,

It’s the wrong holiday, and you’re surprised I can join in.

I joke it will be stuck in our heads for weeks,

But then again, there are worse ruminations than,

“It would have been enough.”

 

Later, with our next pedaled-breeze an unconscious radiance crackles across your face,

And I don’t need to look down into the river to know that it matches mine.

 

There’s a word in Spanish,

That usually means

Enough,

But, in the right context,

Abundance.

 

I hug you a fourth time, and you blow me a kiss,

Just one foot away,

But you need to be sure I breathe it in.

As our wheels carry us in different directions,

I don’t turn on my headphones,

Because I already found my mantra in your sign-off last night:

Thank you,

For all of the above.

 

ABOUT THE ARTIST

 

Teddy G. Goetz is an overly enthusiastic medical student, writer, photographer, biker, runner, and research dork, with a penchant for cooking without recipes and referencing Audre Lorde, Donna Haraway, and Buffy. Currently based in New York, their goal (as both an artist and a doctor-in-training) is to help people feel seen. More of their poetry and photography can be found in The Intima, Vitality, Reflexions, Broad Recognition, and La Madrugada magazines.