I can’t stand the lonely, late-afternoon, so I say his name three times into the television and David Byrne flippy-flops himself from the Hollywood Pantages stage onto my living room floor. He is sweaty and trembling and smells like static so I pick him up and cradle his tiny body hiding among the sea of suit. It feels nice to hold a man with such tenderness. When he’s calmed down, I pack a picnic and take him to the park, where we sit beneath the oak tree by the pond and feed each other pickled onions and hunks of focaccia, where we pour rosé into pink rubber wine cups and tell the stories of our dead people. When we’ve fed the last of our bread to the ducks, he rests his head on my belly and I say I used to do this with someone else and he says what he is supposed to say and the sunset just kind of sits there, like it isn’t the most beautiful thing in the sky.
Andrew Walker was born and raised in Colorado but currently lives in Michigan's upper peninsula where they write poems for grades and take long walks along the frozen beaches of Lake Superior. They write poems and essays appearing in or forthcoming from Alien Magazine, Kissing Dynamite, Pidgeonholes, HAD, Eckleburg, and other rad mags. They lend a helping hand for Passages North, No Contact, and Kissing Dynamite. If you type druwalker.com into your web browser, it will take you to more of their work.