A Poem, in which a Poet who Hasn’t Been on a Date Since 2010, Attempts to Use a Dating App
Just be yourself, they said.
I can’t go on dates.
I don’t know where I’m from.
So, where you from.
I’m from a box of cereal,
with sweetness and crunch, a good mouth-feel.
I was born to a judgmental bank of snow,
‘to learn His holy purpose,’ said the snow,
My whole life, the snow said this.
‘You’ve got to decipher it, His plan,’ she said, shivering.
I’m a decoder ring, unused,
lost in a box of cereal from the 20th century,
with facts on the back and a key
in me, if snow does the talking
it will be quiet in the future, don’t you think?
What was the question?
I can’t go on dates, until I remember how
small talk is done, if I ever did that: small
talk before the divorce. It starts out: So,
are you from here? I’m a class traitor from the last
gas station before Utah, a half-full glass with a PhD, a brass
ash tray bolted to the driver’s seat of the delivery van
my parents borrowed from my florist grandpa
to drive us to Colorado
to show us Trail Ridge Road.
‘Turn around, kids, give Iowa the bird!’
We gave birds, we became birds, we were moving up,
up, so high, so high in the air,
‘there is no god here, above these clouds,’ I said.
I am from these clouds:
cirrus that accumulates over the leeward slope at dusk.
I grew up thinking tundra’s darkness under new moons must be what god is
if indeed there’s any energy in excess of dirt.
I’m deleting the dating app.
The pride of the Chicago-born guy to say
I’m from here, born and raised! You?
Who? I had lived in Chicago for nine days
by the day of my first class in grad school
when I stopped
in the laundromat on Irving Park
to get my clothes, the TV was on,
news was on it, and a plane was in it.
Then plane was in a building, then another one.
They slipped into the ground, straight down
and even now,
I shudder a little, popping Cheetos or carrots or gum in my mouth,
a good mouth-feel, a quick snack, I shudder even so,
when a passenger flight tows
its grotesque shadow down Jackson in the setting sun,
slips its body behind the middle of the Willis, past the Cock, over our luscious
inland sea. All I asked, he says,
was how long you lived here.
Define lived, fool. I cannot meet you for coffee.
I cannot with the app’s little profiles,
The drop-down-2-option-menus that deny my truths,
my times, my contradictions are like chocolate,
you can taste them, have some:
I am a religious atheist, an introverted show-off,
A shy comedian, philosophical non-serious fire-sign
born in a box of snow,
back when snow smothered like a judgmental
mother, I prefer the Holocene, the lake hard-iced all the way,
I am my own plan. There is no plan. I have energy in excess
of ground, here, is where I birthed myself: breakfast lover.
cat owner, mom of one, date for nobody, talkative
quiet type, occasional drinker. Anxious but fine.
Poet, in other words. You?
