Impossible Bottle
Hannah Rego
I don’t know if you’re a person
I can call when I am hurting but
every headache & every news reel makes me
want our eyes glued to each other, or at least
the flat sides of our eyes glued to the same paper plate.
When I feel beauty, I know you can’t feel it at the same rate.
I know when the world is ending we’re pushed
toward one (1) death or two (2) survival but I want
to believe it’s because of the language
we built from across the room. I’m talking a little
about the illegibility of my gender & my visions
of the tiny buildings falling down, but mostly about
that line, towards the end of that
song, from the email, I played during
every shower I took for months. If it’s all just the same,
will you say my name, say my name
in the morning so I’ll know when
the wave breaks. When I think
of all the airport carpet patterns in the world,
I want to lay down in the nearest pile of mulch.
I want to eat whole lambs
with you on a yacht & laugh the whole time
because what would we be doing there? Maybe
you wanted to watch me count ribs in public,
& piece them clean into a bottle: part-hobby,
part-message to watch the waves swallow. Teach me
how to cut a straight line
or at least how to hold a ruler.
Let’s open all the windows in this sandcastle.
Hannah Rego is a writer from Louisville, Kentucky. In 2016 they were awarded the Flo Gault poetry prize by Sarabande Books. They have attended residencies through the Spalding Low-Res MFA and Sundress Publications. Their poetry appears or is forthcoming in BOAAT, BOMB Magazine, Breakwater Review and elsewhere. They live in Brooklyn.
