I stopped playing. Instead,
I lit the tree on fire.
Shoelaces tied with hair
too long to find the lost texts.
And he said, “I’ll play you a song,
tonight only” and in your dreams
of wrappers and Styrofoam you’ll play,
but only for a minute.
I dreamt that I could play again:
song lists scrawled in black ink
and mixed tapes unraveling.
And you stopped calling
two years and seven months ago.
Ann Blackburn is a poet. Her work has previously appeared in Maudlin House, Crack the Spine, Eunoia Review, and elsewhere. She is currently working on her manuscript. Her website can be found at https://www.annblackburnpoetry.com.
Eunoia Review 