Paper Dragons

It feels foolish to be this old.
The world no longer beckons.
It’s too late for a hit record,
a best-seller,
a massif of abdominal muscles
buckling beneath the skin,
even a semblance of bliss.
The world is for the young;
it must pass us by.
We fall behind it,
primping at a shrouded mirror.
“Alas,” we say,
no longer joking,
signifying despair, preface to a eulogy.
The tragedies arrive like weather.
The losses are Olympian.
The swan unfolds into an ATM receipt,
the star becomes a square of rumpled sky.
But I remember every basement
on the cusp of seventh grade—
my cottoned mouth, the dampness of yours.
I kissed you again and again
as we held each other and swayed.

Snow falls on West 95th Street.
I twist through the stations,
relieved to find none of the songs belong to me.
The rivets have fallen out,
the fleet is sinking.
I want to finish with this
open weeping at airports,
my face half-hidden by a boarding pass.
I want a last swirling mote of ecstasy,
an ash from a great fire.

David A. Porter is a graduate of Rutgers University and San Francisco State University, where he received his MFA in creative writing. Porter was a cofounder and the managing editor of 20 Pounds of Headlights, a literary annual published in San Francisco in 2004. He has published fiction, nonfiction, and poetry in Alexandria Quarterly (semifinalist, End of Summer Poem Contest), Cold Mountain Review, Ghost Ocean, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Hotel Amerika, Nimrod, Orange Coast Review, The Santa Clara Review, Sojourn (UT Dallas), Spoon River Poetry Review, Sunbeams (The 2018 Joan Ramseyer Memorial Poetry Contest Anthology), The Surfer’s Journal, W42st and you are here, and he is the editor at large for StereoEmbersMagazine.com. Porter lives in New York, where he is working on a collection of short stories, Protracted Adolescence, a collection of poems, Ghost Season, and a nonfiction book about music, 20,000 Things I Love. Skype ID: porter1306. Twitter: @porter1306. www.stereoembersmagazine.com