Ross White

Grunge

In the 90s my clothes never fit: I practically swam
in jeans a braided belt barely tightened. 

My t-shirts, laid flat, were large as soccer pitches.
I loved being engulfed, so much denim & plaid 

I’d almost disappear inside, become apparition,
boy alive just long enough to see Nine Inch Nails live 

& buy a shirt to prove it. Girls I dated were no more
present in their flannels, Birkenstocks, & those fair 

trade skirts billowing so wide you’d wonder if there were legs
underneath. Nothing revealing. The whole era 

left much to the imagination. I had secrets I didn’t tell
& when no one asked, it was easy to extrapolate: 

I figured no one else was being asked, that like leaves
carried by a trickle of water, we were all drifting along 

on Clintonesque fantasy. I say this not as a form
of apology—when I mean to apologize,

I’ll name each sin & attempt the work of understanding
when & how I committed it. I don’t even think 

I mean to explain: if I say I felt invisible in red wool
& Levi’s, I’m not stupid enough to believe I was. 

Maybe I mean to write a love letter to my old ignorance,
but that ignorance had its day & has since been replaced. 

With every uncomfortable truth we discover
about someone rich & famous for being rich & famous, 

we have to reckon again with whether it’s okay
to love a flawed thing, but listen: we all 

love the flawed thing. I’m grappling with how to love
the perfect one. I’m grappling with what to even call it: 

god, truth, justice, equanimity. Its just surfaces gleam
with such luster I cannot find my own reflection. 

It is so smooth that when I try to hold it, my fingers
slip from the edges. I have these huge pockets, 

but no pocket large enough to hold it.
I have this braided belt cinched around nothing.

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Ross White is the director of Bull City Press, an independent publisher of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. He is the author of Guilt Ledger, winner of the Wren Poetry Prize; Charm Offensive, winner of the Sexton Prize for Poetry; and three chapbooks: How We Came Upon the Colony, The Polite Society and Valley of Want. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, New England Review, POETRY, Ploughshares, Poetry Daily and The Southern Review, among others. He teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Find him on Bluesky: @rosswhite and at rosswhite.com.