Poetry by Ben Westlie
On your porch in our stupor
I kept turning to leave
your voice clung to me
holding me like my shadow.
I don’t know if I trembled
from the bitter temperatures
or how your heart kept speaking out
of turn. The green glowing in your irises
like small cauldrons. The yearning bones of your face.
I should’ve hidden from the moon
so there could be no shadows to latch onto.
I should have blamed my drunken blood.
I prayed for deafness upon my heart.
I should have sprinted down your porch stairs
until I reached another state.
My kind of love wasn’t in any of your mirrors.
Your face is what I see when snow becomes
stars from moonlight. When I hear the creak of old
wood on porches. When I see unruly auburn hair.
I turned around to the begging
of your face. A friend is all you wanted.
The moonlight made me beastly.
A feral creature raging and starving.
Ben Westlie holds an MFA in Poetry from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Publications: Time You Let Me In: 25 Poets Under 25 edited by Naomi Shihab Nye, The Fourth River, Third Coast, Atlas and Alice, the tiny journal, Trampset, ArLiJo, Otis Nebula, WhimsicalPoet, DASH, MUSE, Speckled Trout Review, and Superpresent.
