Nicholas Barnes
too much to ask
a wilson basketball thrown at my skull. life then was endurance. my best friend forgets how to spell my name. a pigskin catapulted into my spine. up against the wall, i see the entire school playing soccer, tetherball, and hopscotch without me. i recite all thirty letters to keep myself entertained. in the twinkling of an eye, i’m printing that same alphabet soup onto a photocopied lease agreement. a new apartment. the roommate says this just isn’t working out. a diet breakup, a minor severance. the first time i was dumped was a dear john affair. after a night of inhaling all the unlimited possibilities. the h bomb was face to face. surprise attack. you were always going somewhere and that somewhere was never me. and all the other brokenhearted guillotine psalms i held over my head. like bottlenecks of dewar’s white label, jim beam rye, and smirnoff caffeine muddlement. here comes one more swearing off, a fit of self improvement. a new fifth of london dry gin to take its place. to calcify my grievances. stronger than before the fracture. saline eye storms chased with grapefruit tonic. then, i lived in the mountains of my own making. busted peaks of high life glass pulled up from the earthquake plane. maybe in some faraway land it would have all been better. in another body. in another brain. maybe i would have been invited to a pickup truck bonfire. maybe i’d have fit in at the senior promenade. maybe i would’ve gone. maybe someone would have said cole, love me love me love me. maybe i would have said it too.
private beauty
bought a two-headed tulip: $3.99.
i don’t get out much to feel the spring sun
so i thought i’d bring the outside inside.
now she sits on my molding windowsill
in a chipped peter rabbit coffee mug.
away from her grocery outlet of birth
into my domestic primavera.
only a mesh screen and a thin glass pane
separate us from all them bees abuzz,
sniffing the pollen and blackheart stigmas.
i thought i’d save her but it’s guilt instead
that rides me sidesaddle every morning.
parting the cheap white plastic blinds again,
i tell us this will have to do for now.
Nicholas Barnes is a poet living in Portland, Oregon whose work has appeared in over seventy publications including trampset, Juked, and Cola Literary Review. His debut chapbook, Restland, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in 2025.
