Tonight
When I meet you at the bar it is 2:30, and it is raining, and I am holding a sweatshirt that
I’ve had since high school. I compare you again to the pictures I’ve saved of 17, 18: a boy
who drives a series of brand new pick-ups, a boy who hangs from a basketball hoop in the
church parking lot, a boy who has a beard that will not grow. I imagine the hallway in
which all of the important things intersected, where I’d sat for days imagining a future,
writing all of it down. It does not matter if what I wrote looked anything like what we’ve
spread out on the table between us. I mean, perhaps you think I should not be here at all.
biography
SARAH CARSON’s poetry and short stories have appeared in Columbia Poetry Review, DIAGRAM, Guernica, The Nashville Review, and The New Orleans Review, among others. She is the author of three chapbooks, and two full-length collections, Poems in which You Die (BatCat Press, 2014) and Buick City (Mayapple Press, forthcoming 2015). Sometimes she blogs at sarahamycarson.wordpress.com.