There are people who are always not you

Marie Lopez

You’ll never know how fun it is –

God, the urge of romanticism 

Such a precise itch 

What if I had met you in the store

What if I had met you in subway air 

We keep saying our time now has no rules

So, perhaps I’ll send you that Linda Pastan poem 

One day we can see the most terrible amber

Together, a moss that leaps centuries old 

Our indulgence is begged: nature claims no rights

And the lichen, the lichen will always turn on you 

We invent the rights and lefts of Spring

Dance under the cracking sound of street lamps 

God, the range of visible colors

Our addictions laid bare 

Anemic embraces on the thoroughfares

Forcing an ever-diminishing sustenance 

Lying down after the suspension of rain

The quiet in me, God, is this me 

The rhythm of craving and ill will

Which is song-like in the feeling it evokes 

No explanation is pretended

We simply live 

At the precipice of nature’s rights

For better, worse, for all this time 

The light of fiction shatters 

Except that fretful oscillation around the central

Question that brings us closer

Marie Lopez (b. 1992) is an MFA candidate The New School. She got into poetry after doing visual art for most of her life because she knew that it would be a lucrative business move. She lives and works in New York, New York. You can email her at mariejoelopez@gmail.com, she loves emails and gets them everyday.