Kathleen Winter

Breathless

You slam your hand against the payphone,
the camera’s outside, you’re always igniting
till the end when you say twice
that you’re tired. A gangster chugging milk,
trickle of it, quick wipe it aside, run
your thumb over your bottom lip
for the twentieth time in ninety minutes.
You remind me of my lost love, that blend
of promise and impulse, watching you
brings the yellow aftertaste of fatal
decisions, haze of having been ill
and not getting past it, not ever getting
truly and thoroughly well.
You smoke, you don’t eat, you smoke you
steal you talk to yourself as though you were
old. Nobody your age talks to himself that way—
it’s Godard’s fault, for a sec he wants to make you
understandable. But you’re a rune,
a guy who stands out like an amethyst
on the end of a No. 2 pencil. Do you have them
in Paris? I’ll give you mine, souvenir, use it
to write down all those phone numbers.
You’re smart, you have long bones, borderline
beautiful but what you don’t know
is that a phone number is gonna kill you.

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Kathleen Winter is the author of the collections Transformer, I will not kick my friends and Nostalgia for the Criminal Past. Her work has appeared in The New Republic, The New Statesman, AGNI, Cincinnati Review, Diode, Yale Review and The Adroit Journal. She was granted fellowships by the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Maison Dora Maar, James Merrill House and Cill Rialaig. Awards include the Rochelle Ratner Memorial Prize, Ralph Johnston Fellowship and Poetry Society of America The Writer Magazine/Emily Dickinson Award.