SPECTATOR

by Brendan Rowland

She relaces her shoes, head bent

as if in pain, one tuft of hair curling

into her eye like a fishhook; she

scrutinizes the shoe already done,

mystified that the laces won’t line up,

like an addict squinting at a scratchoff,

like my match dying in Liverpool rain. She

half-mindedly scrapes mud from the shoe-

edge, black clouding blue nails. We fold

her wrinkled pants and she folds hers

the same way I do. She says she feels safe

around me. I resent it.

I scrawl sonnets on her walls and give her answers

to her “Araby” quiz while her forced laugh decays

among Saint Anne’s Lace in urns and her father’s curses.

She’s still stifled by his eyes slighting hers in the rearview.

I lie facedown on her roof, revel in the tactile fiberglass

bite. I think of him and her lover and her and me and I

know that she and I are bound up by her passion play.

I’m Peter fleeing, I am Persephone, an unwilling audience.

I strew cherry blossoms on her floor while she and herselves

matryoshka. She doesn’t move, wine-coffined, eyebrows

tapering into frustration over a ratty shoelace. I want to heal

the bruises on the roof of her mouth without touching her.

Author Bio:

Brendan Rowland, studying modern literature, lives in Westford, Massachusetts, several lots down from Edgar Allan Poe’s brief residence. While writing, he sports black denim, cream-colored cat hair, and Sennheiser headphones blasting rock ‘n’ roll. He will begin a master’s at the University of Glasgow in Fall, 2023.

Artist Bio:

Beaumont Sugar is an essayist, painter, and poet. Their piece “Sheepdog, Standing in the Rain” was nominated for Best of the Net, and they won The Forge’s creative nonfiction contest in 2022 with “That Car Salesman Knew My Sister.” They’re doing the best they can.

ig: beaumontsugar