THREE POEMS
/ DAWN ANGELICCA BARCELONA
Butters: A Burning Haibun Tuesday. Katie texts me while I’m on the Purple Line to school. Hey gal, have you heard the news? I wrote back: The shooting on Morse? Raquel quitting? It’s a lot, are you ok taking in possibly triggering news? Hit me. Erik passed away last week. Fuck. He missed some stuff on Monday and was unresponsive so Shauna worried and Viv did a wellness check on Tuesday and Mag announced he passed. Katie stops answering and I run off the train and into a bathroom stall and stand for 20 minutes, waiting for tears, though nothing comes. His birthday was last week. I breathe deeply through three hours of class. I reverse my trip home. It pours and it surprises me. I cry. Pathetic fallacy. Katie’s not answering. I ride in the Otis elevator up to my apartment and take a fist to the metal grate. I wail. I bruise. I run to my room and dig up a card to thumb his signature. Butters. I watch his photography video on loop. He loved Lands End. This is where his memorial will be. Eventually redwood trees. In lieu of flying to San Francisco, I will walk to the Philz Coffee on Lincoln and write.
68 Modern Language Studies 55.1