Intention
Michael Turle
You cry out your vague confessions in the space between hope and the horror
that she might make sense of your maladaptation;
that the awful secret of your love
might spill over, unbecoming from your shoulders
and relieve you of its awful weight
that she might ever want you, too.
You develop a Stockholm Syndrome for something that’s sold as solitude,
learn to sip selfhood like wine—
to get drunk on the sorrow of aloneness
disguised as the joy of being alone.
***
Every intention feels like a pretense,
condescension or begging questions
and many things that feel like begging—
but she is kind and welcomes bridges,
built towards some metaphor of love
that doesn’t exist quite yet. At a minimum, I am thankful to her
for her tenure, however brief,
as a warmer kind of delusion.
***
In my daydreams she is more than that
and we share joints and smiles like thieves
across the couch of an apocryphal apartment
making tarot card tattoos kiss;
she is finally happy with her job and I’m thinking of getting a cat
and we’ll name it something stupid like
“Bidet” or
“Tax Evasion”
and we’ll call her “Taxi” for short and worry
about if she’ll eat our cactuses,
but beyond that we have no worries—
beyond that we are ok.
Michael Turle is an English major with a minor in creative writing at Kent State University. He serves as the managing editor of Luna Negra, KSU’s arts and literature mag, works as a tutor at the university Writing Commons, and plays trumpet in the Golden Flashes’ athletic bands. Michael’s poetry has appeared previously in Red Cedar Review, the zine REBIRTH by KCSB, and elsewhere. In the future, Michael hopes to pursue a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing and poetics and intends to teach poetry at a collegiate level.