ON APOLOGIZING AFTER THE EARTH HAS CIRCLED THE SUN A HUNDRED TIMES
BY KAYLEB RAE CANDRILLI
When I first slept with the woman
I could have loved, I pitched
a camping tent in the bedroom
and played music only made
on synth boards. After, she said
I was softer than the men
before me. All these years later,
and I still wish I had treated
her more like my skin, delicate and
smoother than she thought
it would be. Regret is underrated.
I keep regret on the mantle
and let it whisper whenever it wants.
Outside, the wind rolls beer
cans down the street, and in a world
where I was once cruel, these
will have to be wind chimes, and music,
and an apology only I can hear.
ELEGY FOR THE NOT YET DEAD RAINFOREST CAFE
BY KAYLEB RAE CANDRILLI
It’s a wild place, yes, but birthday parties are still thrown
and candles are still blown out, and thin streams of smoke
drift up into the cloudy, thundering ceiling. All most kids
ever wanted was a middle-class dinner out, with crayons
and spider monkeys swinging from the rafters. In Atlantic
City, as my partner and I order Cheetah Ritas and eat stale
nachos—on our one weekend vacation a year—I wonder
who will bankrupt first, the Olive Garden down the road
from my mother’s little pink house, or every rainforest
in the world. There is only so much oxygen to go around
and I wish I could explain to my dog why he doesn’t have
a yard, and why he’s on a leash, and why I cry in the winter,
when it isn’t cold at all and it should be. There is so much
that needs explaining. In some forests, the trees grow
so as to never touch one another—the canopy’s crown
spinning a very shy web, but a web nonetheless.
Sometimes I grow like this, looking up toward the sun,
with my hands tucked in my pockets. Sometimes I run
my fingers through my partner’s hair and breathe in, for just
a little extra air. Photosynthesis is far more impressive magic
than any door leading to Narnia, any fortune telling 8-ball
twisted in your hands, over and over. You should already
know, every breath we take is a spell cast out and reeling.
I KEEP LIL UZI VERT’S LADY BUG BIC LIGHTER IN MY POCKET
BY KAYLEB RAE CANDRILLI
and for as long as I’m allowed to live, Uzi’s lighter is good luck.
In Philadelphia, the ATVs roll through the streets, much the same
as where I come from—all four wheelers, going too fast, with a dash
of toxic masculinity. Who am I to judge the engines that bring men
together, the raw exhaust of it all. When I was young, I wanted so
badly to become a boy that I became one. Nearly anything is possible,
if you pursue it. From the back seat of my Mother’s Ford Expedition
I’d claim I could run as fast as the car was rolling, thirty or forty
or seventy miles per hour. I miss that particular hubris of youth.
Now, there’s not much cartilage left in my knees and I only run
when running from someone. The world is a difficult place to live
and most days I’m thankful. But then again, recently, metric tons
of red ink spilled into a creek, and I’ll be honest, it’s hard
to even look at all that blood in the water.
