Meghan Bennett
It’s a new town, and I’m driving down streets that don’t know your tires
and I’m trying to sing all the layers of “God Only Knows”
all alone. There used to be a romance to this, in the ‘90s, so they tell me,
to sitting in a parking lot after work crying along to the Beatles,
or Oasis, before there was an app to tell your mother where you are
so now she’ll text and ask if you’ll stop and grab milk
on your way home from your melancholy.
There are fragments that are still the same: the shirt that smells
of fryer grease, the yearning to have been born in a different era,
and the crappy mix tapes, only they’re playlists now, 30-second ads—
try explaining Bluetooth to John Lennon, right—
but you don’t feel very romantic. Instead you just feel cold,
despite the postmortem spasm of summer, despite the shoddy AC,
like you missed the ship everybody else got on and now
you’re in the water, freezing and barely treading and there’s no Leo
or Kate or hell, James Cameron
to tell you how beautiful you look while drowning.
We used to make a game of that: try to find the VHS Titanic box set
at every yard sale your gran dragged us to on Sunday mornings,
amidst the label-less 45s we’d buy and play on her creaky turntable,
a treasure hunt decades in the making, three-minute time travel.
Now I’m the headless naked Barbie for 10 cents in a cobwebby bin.
Now I’m the girl in the supermarket parking lot,
trying not to think about how happy you must be that I’m not
haunting our old town like a stubborn lovelorn ghost,
and how happy you must be that I’m still thinking about you,
trying to find something to hate in all the songs you used to play me.