Jason Labbe

from Dear Photographer

On the subway once, you mentioned the architect

read you Finnegan’s Wake in bed to get your father

out of your head. But the past did not vanish, only

flashed outside the window like a shorting streetlight

at midnight. When you and I shared a bed,

I never would have read you, or even mentioned, the book

written by my ex-girlfriend, three hundred pages

of answers without their questions. All along

she knew that only conclusions make you famous.

What I have needed to know in the darkest hour

of every sleepless dawn could be asked in a single word,

answered in less, but she doesn’t even respond

to emails anymore, let alone texts or telepathic messages.

Once that town inside you dies, you don’t even try

to remember their shape or impression on the other side

of a lumpy and sagging hand-me-down mattress,

the kind you have when you’re too young and broke

for sleep to matter. When she left, I couldn’t bear her smell

and the idea of lying with millions of her dead skin cells,

so I threw the mattress on the curb, which I spotted

the next morning dragged under the BQE.

A vague dark shape, either garbage or a body seeking warmth

under a garbage bag, lay heaped under the drone

of countless cars carrying everyone increasingly away.

Even the architect, blindingly tall and handsome

in your photographs, has been trying his whole life

to get home. His riches do not matter. Even his bed is gone.

What any of us would do now, so many years later

and floating into sleepless nowhere on memory foam,

to feel those springs dig into our backs again, to be

nudged awake and whispered to, Baby you’re snoring again.