Foreign Language Film

I dream of two strangers having sex.
There’s a song on in the background,
it’s not in English,
I don’t know what language it is.
This was the night after the night
I cried into my wine at a
fried chicken restaurant.
It’s never the person,
it’s the fact it was possible –
that a front or calculated silence,
a passive rejection,
whatever you want to call it,
was possible, plausible
The worst part is:
when I was surest of my direction
that’s the exact point I realized
I had none.
It does seem possible
I could have watched the trailer for this
rather than living it out,
I would still have seen enough
to say I saw it.

––Caitlin Brady

Reality (Slight Return)

As the morning light seeps
through frayed and faded lace curtains,
the memory of various recent mortifications
begins to sting and cling to me afresh,
while older, evergreen sources of irritation,
hardy perennials of chagrin
and crushing desolation,
also burst forth through the cracks
in the driveway of my mind:
the first stale surge is felt in the head,
then it spreads… to the heart
and the gut, and once started,
it is hard to suppress.
Not that I really try. 

––John Tottenham