Sobered

We walked into the streets, mouths

burning and sparking with the words we found

but didn’t offer to each other.

When I slept, my belly tingled as I slipped into restlessness

while you ached with escitalopram and me

with fluoxetine— like heartburn but more sluggish.

I circled you when God and Death came to our doors to make

us hold on, so we did

and we never would’ve found something that would work.

Your fingers crushed my flannel and my

head, but I was supposed to be the savior and a gallon

of precious light, and I wasn’t supposed

to spill it on the concrete stained with shreds of fabric

or lose it in a vast sea of muted waves. I knew that

we were strong, but I know now we were as drunk as

two fourteen-year-olds could be on something with the shape of commitment

or maybe something purely mundane because

that’s who we were— teens with souls to tap against the glass and

find their fortitude in hazed up streets and heads and burnout

that stumbled away in clean, blueish air.