NELLE 7 | 2024
It’s the tree I can’t get over—
salvaged Christmas tree someone hauled in
in January, still up mid-March, in a cabin
in Vermont, a demure circle
of needles shed to the floor. No one
moved it, all of us swishing past
with backpacks, pizza boxes, me
with my mixtapes on the windowsill, a throwback
even then— and the earth outside
taking its cues from the crocuses,
the thaw beginning far below the snow.
Once we saw a bear scuttle up a tree
in the neighborhood and it took us
three minutes to turn to each other and say
that was a bear?
What I loved about the mixtape was how the order
of its songs became a message, and wherever
it cut off was where the story had to end—
instrumental interlude or
middle of a sentence—
You were mine among woodsmoke
and calculus homework (someone else’s,
spilled under the couch like a paper river), among
cowboy hats, let’s have a sleepover,
symmetry of bodies,
are you going to put this in a poem?
Girl in snow boots, girl in sequins,
my new philosophy is everything goes in a poem
and one day our roommates dragged that tree
into the woods and lit it—
galaxy of sparks in the dark forest, our
breath steaming as we circled the flames
smoke tumbling into messages we couldn’t read
or look away from—