Mint Hill—Late for the Reading
for J
Shooed out the shop by broom.
My fault.
I offered to sweep the threshold.
Crumbs and ash. Aged paper.
The bent bristles that pierced our ribs.
We shuffled on again, all scars and none
the wiser. Idiots of the night. The same
poems wrinkled in our breast pockets
like we’ve said what we had to and maybe that’s enough.
I wasn’t sorry for anything
or anyone
until reality pulled the rug
and the floor appeared from nowhere.
Balance was never my strength. Face first
into a pipe. Caught the tail end of a dream
I swear the moon had it coming.
But the porcelain man with thick saliva
wouldn’t buy it either, so you paid
double for our spills, God’s nonchalance,
ripped off the backward sign
as we were leaving.
We are always just leaving
from here
to there
a little less than who we were,
wired on pick-me-ups and metaphor.
The parking lot cleared.
Puddled white lines. Capillaries of tar.
I leaned against an already
leaning lamp which woke the gulls
into a rumble above you
lighting up on the hood of the busted Taurus
we borrowed from your brother.
We were homesick in our aimlessness.
You hadn’t been yourself in a while,
not since the detour to Potter’s field,
when we curled our fingers
through the chain link
and watched neon machines level the hills
to fill the pond
after the latest drowning.
They planted seeds in the mud but the grass won’t grow.
They drew straws.
They fenced it off for good.
I have a short memory and a book of excuses
I don’t remember writing.
The problem is, you said, we think there’s more
to the flame we can’t control. What used
to flicker gets carried by the breeze.
And blindly we arrive
with pages we can’t interpret
or unfold
having scrawled our best words in the dark.
Chad Weeden is the author of the debut poetry collection The Ice Stayed but the Water Left (Broken Tribe Press, 2025). His poems have appeared in Appalachian Review, Midwest Quarterly, Jabberwock Review, Asheville Poetry Review, Jet Fuel Review, and elsewhere. He is also a portrait photographer and lives in Rhode Island. For additional information, visit chadweedenphoto.com.
