February 13, 2025
Winter Sunlight, Glenn Stuart Pearce, ca. 1939. Gift of Pennsylvania W. P. A., 1943. From the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Losing the Band
I spot a bug on the wicker chair across from me.
I should be somewhere three hours ahead from
now. Nobody wants a novel about a girl
swept in Christmas. Mine would be called Losing the Band.
I try to make out last December through the fog in my glasses.
All I taste is a stranger’s breathy vocals.
I climbed up loaves of bread breaking fever to hear the last
of the reverb. I haven’t wrapped your present yet. I let the bug
crawl up my translucent tights. I remember our first snow
and the way the streetlamp lit up streaked in paint thinner white.
I kept your tulips in the ice box and the tambourine in the fireplace.
I won’t sleep on your side of the desk when you’re not here.
We’ll hitchhike back to our world of airmail sailboats
and wind-up toys and have teeth on the same day.
I leave a message using speech-to-text
as the bug leaves my line of vision. I’ll wait all night
in thirty degrees if it means icicles on spidery branches
and pure noise.
Ashley D. Escobar is a writer and filmmaker from San Francisco, residing in New York City. Eileen Myles selected her debut poetry collection, GLIB (2025), as the Changes Book Prize winner. Her work has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Hobart, and The London Magazine, among others.
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ashleyxescobar@gmail.com
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