Rachel Myers
Summer 2025 | Poetry
Neighbors
Bedded down in a rented galley apartment. Patchwork
ceiling. I like to say it has character, but it's a careless
bare minimum, three different shades of beige. I stalk
my long hall at night. The woman upstairs fights
with her boyfriend. We're not friends. The basement floods
weekly. Sometimes I laugh despite this, mouth to no one
it's like we're fish in a long can. Outside the tulips bloom
yellow with tips dipped in white. When I was a child
we had no playground. We drew houses in the sand.
Rectangles for rooms, swirls for the arms of imaginary
couches. Each of us made a castle of boxes, lines
to divide our little kingdom. Even then we measured
ourselves against each other. Stole plots of land to grow
our field of architectural rendering. We ate one another
like bonefish. We ceased only when we quit making new teeth.
Rachel Lauren Myers is a poet living in Massachusetts. Her work can be found in ISSUE01, RESOURCES, Okay Donkey, SoFloPoJo, Red Ogre Review, and elsewhere. She almost always marries Shane in every Stardew Valley playthrough. Catch her on Instagram at @hellostarbuck.