Romance
JW’s photo
He arrived, she arrived. Actors in an improv class, two spies waiting for code words, ex-lovers hoping the other would sing first. Charisma, unusual truncations, the usual amnesia. He reached for her hand. I see how this piece speaks to the space between people he said. I see how it speaks to the way people collapse into each other she replied. The band launched, echoey guitar chords, a singer who writhed like an injured snake. Someone blew out the lights. It might have been 1936 in Berlin, 1967 in San Francisco, 2024 in Tokyo. He considered telling her about the white roses that dropped from the sky every time they were together, how he’d filled a notebook with songs about her. She wanted to tell him that he was familiar from a previous life, there was a tragedy buried in their subtext that neither could read. He swallowed as the first song ended. She swallowed as the second song began. He turned to speak but she’d vanished, he smelled her perfume, he studied his hand as if perhaps he’d imagined her standing next to him. When they met again, he knew they would, he’d open a valve, he’d give her his dried flowers & chord charts, a copy of his book on the history of shame, he’d find her, she’d find him, those severed lines would reconnect.
Loop 2
He hadn’t seen her since the Bonnard soiree, when she drank an urn of champagne, he smoked his way into a nightmare house, they woke on different boats in different dead seas. In the morning, he navigated home through a storm, his hull dragging the reef. She called a water taxi, a friend in a green uniform arrived, flew her to the city. This strikes me as a Rorschach he finally said I see a man leaping from a high dive into a pool of beer. To me it stinks of realism she replied is this supposed to be a QR code? She reeled her thoughts into her rib cage, as word bubbles swirled around him. A shadow sprawled across the gallery floor, the paintings darkened. He felt like a runner who kept jumping the starter gun. I’ll call you he said, knowing he would. Perfect she said, knowing he wouldn’t. They’d rehearsed the exit a dozen times in other lives but didn’t remember, the way she scurried out the front, lips clenched, the way he left through the back, stomping down a long, wet alley. He thought about texting her, even calling out her name, but she was already so far away.
John Amen was the recipient of the 2021 Jack Grapes Poetry Prize and the 2024 Susan Laughter Myers Fellowship. His poems and prose have appeared recently in Rattle, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Daily, and Tupelo Quarterly, and his poetry has been translated into Spanish, French, Hungarian, Korean, and Hebrew. His new collection, Dark Souvenirs, was released by New York Quarterly Books in May 2024.