Rue Huang

Guilt Poem

Over the twenty-five cent payphone, under a fingernail moon
sliced into cream-cheese-thin-quarters,
telephone static zipping across Central Park,
I call you. I tell you that I miss you in the only way a poet knows
how, which is to say I did not really know how,
and you did not pick up.
So instead I watched a pigeon nibble on the edge
of a burger wrapped in a newspaper, headlined WOMAN ACCIDENTALLY—
spotted a chipped makeup mirror in a dusty corner and thought
of the story of the girl
who slammed down the phone on a faceless boyfriend before me—
how maybe he lived down in Manhattan and
got tired of listening to her tell him she missed him—
and decided she deserved better, anyway—
she was probably watching some old nineties film in a cinema by now,
refusing to cry and briefly, I considered following her,
until I thought of how we first met, bright-eyed and superstitious,
both still searching for ourselves in the space between our
skin and our insides—
that where one ends, the other only just begins,
yet by then you had left violent-shaped wounds
all over the moon, under the skyline and in the
permanent neurocircuitry of my still-budding prefrontal cortex, but
by then it was too late because the pigeon had torn away a fat chunk of moon,
I mean cheese, and with it the rest of the headline:
—JOINS SEARCH PARTY LOOKING FOR HERSELF—
and just like the pigeon eating what
was left of the crumbs, I felt sorry and understood
at the same time. I hoped she found herself in a storm drain,
or the Brooklyn Bridge, instead of payphones
that promised love but ate quarters, or a sudden urge to scream at a stranger
Care! Care! I dare you to! but what I am really trying to say is,
there was one point in my life where I listened to a song
without thinking of sadness, or of you,
or of synonyms for the two, which is to say everything,
for the last time, and it could have been the elegy that called me a liar,
which I am,
or it could have been my old brick high school that turned
adults and children into machines, or when I moved into my apartment
and brushed my teeth to the sound of traffic
every morning, or the night where I told you
where everything hurt the most, but it was definitely before you
picked up every broken scrap and put city light band-aids
and spectral planets all over them until morning. There
will be no violence in your gaze,
but same elegy will call me a liar,
which I am, under that same pinched-face moon
which some call a lover, the pigeon’s great-great-great-
grandchildren will be flocking to the cheap oil smell of Second Avenue burgers
when my cell phone rings, straight into voicemail.

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Rue Huang really loves blueberries and jazz. You can find her doomscrolling @rue.huang on Instagram.