In the Future
I pretend that you’re there, Week One of football season walking in with a Hoooo!! like Hacksaw Jim Duggan,
prepared to describe in painstaking detail how ugly my Burgundy & Gold fan-cave is because Dallas has always been America’s Team.
I’ve wearing my Sean Taylor and you go with Troy Aikman— we embrace anyway, and I tell you that you smell nice while your tongue reaches for my ear.
Laughing, every other head shakes and even your second mother waits her turn for a hug.
Downstairs, we are on opposite sides of the room only to the naked eye.
As the hours rush by faster than either of us want we meet each other’s friends, feast, drink, and watch the Cowboys lose.
Afterwards, as everyone has departed for their waning evenings, as the nighttime game begins and we’re the only two left
you turn, now next to me on the couch with the TV turned down and say,
I thought that went really well, bro. How’s next week sound?
Unsolvable
I am half of an equation that can’t be solved,
the missing variables muddied in waters which rushed to flood the ghost-towns and empty neighborhoods of our brotherhood,
lonely monuments we built to the truth and thunderstorms, sunny days and hearts breaking like Piñatas—
everything I wish I could tell you.
The problem isn’t the distance— it’s that I’m sitting here, night by night still after the solution to the equation
and you’re out for a jaunt walking the beaches of Heaven, wishing I’d shut up, put down the pen
and come on outside to watch the moon with you.
Brandon C. Spalletta is a poet from Herndon, Virginia. His poetry has been published in Maryland Literary Review, WWPH Writes, Bourgeon, and the anthology 2014 Storm Cycle: Best of Kind of a Hurricane Press. His poem “Daydreaming” recently received an Honorable Mention for the 2023 Luce Prize, and newer poetry is forthcoming in Dodging the Rain. At twelve years old he stood atop Old Rag Mountain, and his heart never came down.