The Dogs I Have Kissed

by Trista Mateer

  or fir trees.

  Not wanting to be a man with a coffee cup mouth.

  Just wanting to be a man

  alone somewhere

  without all the fuss.

  The Most Magnificent Pastime

  He said, “I never want to pull out of you”

  and I think I fell in love. What a fucked up thing to do.

  And this wasn’t supposed to be a fucked up poem

  but it’s turning into a fucked up poem

  because I haven’t been able to come in three years

  without thinking of his hips sliding into mine: like first base,

  like second base, like third base,

  like home.

  Before You Leave Me

  The sky has that just before rain smell

  and your hands are knotted in my hair.

  We are people with arms intertwined

  like the pattern on a tartan scarf.

  We are people with arms intertwined

  almost like lovers hesitant to say goodbye

  (but not quite).

  There is a warning in the wind whipping around us.

  I smell fear on you like a dog

  but I don’t say

  anything.

  We Both Know What It Is

  Watch me knock over every cup of coffee

  poured in this house.

  Watch me rip the pits out of fruit

  just to throw the whole thing away.

  I don’t know how to be angry with you.

  I don’t know why I thought the sound of your voice

  could make up for all the bad things

  that ever happened to me.

  I tried to write poems about your leaving

  before you left me

  because I was scared;

  now I write them because I don’t know what

  else to do in your absence.

  You have ripped something from both of us

  but I don’t know what it is.

  I’m sorry I have to lie to make it easy.

  Ask Me to Stay

  Tell me that you have been dreaming of me.

  That you wake up in cold sweats, gulping in air.

  You feel like you’ve drowned. You wake up and

  still feel like you’re drowning.

  Tell me that you’ve spent a great deal of time

  gazing at stars, thinking that sometimes things look

  better farther apart. That constellations are beautiful

  only because we have the space to connect the dots.

  Now take it back. Tell me that you’re sorry. That you

  know we’re not stars. We’re just people. Tell me that

  you know there’s nothing poetic about plane tickets.

  Tell me that you want to buy them anyway.

  Ask me to stay.

  I Swear Somewhere This Works

  In a parallel universe or another world

  or a different life,

  we sit across from each other

  at the kitchen table

  and go over

  the grocery

  list.

  I Forgive You for Not Meeting Me on the Bridge

  You have EXIT sign lips.

  Something I want to run toward in case

  of emergency.

  And everything is an emergency.

  Lover, I’m out of bread and milk,

  come lay your hands on me.

  I’m writing another love poem because

  I don’t know how to write about The Bad Stuff yet.

  The Crying and The Leaving. The Giving Up. The

  way I want to beat my fists against walls and break

  every plate in my house. The way I want to shove

  words back into my mouth and learn to swallow

  everything whole.

  Tell me that you feel it, too. Tell me that you have

  flooded like the Amazon in monsoon season.

  Everything you love is wet.

  Everything I love is lost somewhere downstream.

  You have seen me through all of my dog days. I want

  to repay you with mouth to mouth. With coffee in bed.

  With nights spent next to you. I want to repay you by

  stealing all of your blankets and wearing your shirts

  and keeping the AC on all winter just so I have an

  excuse to stay close.

  Before I met you, I never would have let anything

  get this far.

  That is the “love” in this love poem. I took your hand

  and wanted to walk out onto something unsteady. I

  wanted to take the leap. The jump. The fall from a very

  tall building. I wanted the mess of it. All of it.

  I wanted you in your slippers with the dog

  you’ve had for eight months and still haven’t named.

  I wanted you. You and your Californian fault lines.

  You and that coffee cup mouth. You and those hands

  made for cradling fruit and steering wheels and the

  phone and me.

  I don’t know how to do this.

  Me.

  I don’t know how to walk away from you.

  Maybe that is the blessing in all of this mess.

  Maybe if you came into my life to teach me one thing,

  it was to hang up my running shoes for a while.

  Not just to want to.

  I keep thinking of when we met. Long-distance

  phone calls. Those nights you used to lay on

  your bedroom floor in the dark and I would muffle

  my voice with pillows and blankets, hunkered down

  in my own bed. We would talk until the sun was up here,

  but three thousand miles away, you were still

  a little behind me.

  I guess it’s still like that. You are far enough behind

  to love me but not be able to say it. And I have been

  far enough ahead to see the end of this. Baby, it doesn’t

  look very good. Baby, at some point it just stopped

  making sense.

  I don’t know how to be angry with you, but my pride

  demands I figure it out. It is so easy to make monsters

  out of the people I have loved, to pick up a pen and

  write “THIS IS YOUR FAULT” until the page is full.

  It is easier to make myself the monster, to snap and bite

  and run and hide. It is easy to bare my teeth.

  It is harder to be honest.

  Nobody here has claws or sharp teeth.

  I am not the bomb and I am not the city where

  it went off: buildings crumbled, everything ash.

  The casualties are not my fault, but the aftermath

  is a mess.

  Sometimes things don’t work.

  And that’s it.

  We ran around the wire. A tin can telephone

  stretched as far as it could go without breaking.

  And then it broke.

  Acknowledgements

  This little book has received a lot of help and the only reason it’s come to fruition is because a couple of other people have offered up their love and support consistently during the process of writing all of this and then stitching it together into something coherent. Affection and absolute gratitude to:

  Caitlyn Siehl for the late night text messages and

  for reading this mess before anyone else; Fortesa Latifi for checking in on me; Emily Keenan for just existing in the world; Rachel Drummond for knowing the whole story; Krystle Alder for putting up with all of my vague design requests and still coming through with something lovely; Clementine von Radics and WAYP for giving this book its first home—

  & you, for reading, always.

  About The Author

  Trista Mateer is a writer and poet living outside of Baltimore, Maryland. She believes in lipstick, black tea, and owning more books than she can ever possibly read. Th
e author of two collections of poetry, she is also known for her eponymous blog.

  To find out more, write or visit her on Twitter @tristamateer or at tristamateer@gmail.com.

  See more work at: tristamateer.com.