by Derek Graf

—for E.

Everywhere this midsummer vanity:
half-furnished apartments, the shot

mutt and the dumpster it rots in, gutted
pigs, broken axles, coke-lines and stop

signs humid with rust. A few months
until this is over, but at six a.m. we’re falling

out of hope again: we take asylum
in naked diction, dumb agnosticism,

and when you say the rain’s fading I think
it’s fading everywhere. What is friendship?

To cover your body with mine and stall
this rupturing? Elliott, I have one belief,

tenuous, yours to thrift, that though we are
given lungs, a little cash, crowded bars,

and steel pipes to shatter each streetlight,
these daily ruins are our own doing, born

of unrest and weak ambition like smoke
inside a prison. Listen: we could say

the weather’s clearing and so on, but isn’t
that a hopeless kind of vanity even for us?