Before My Time Runs Out
with a nod toward Andrea Gibson's "new kind of bucket list"
I want to meet Alisha, my beautiful friend of 13 years whom I haven’t met yet. I want to visit Seattle and meet Kester and Andy, wife-and-husband musicians who sustained me during pandemic. I want to speak Italian fluently, and not just fake fluency with a few lines of memorized poems. I want to play guitar as easily as I do in my recurring dream. I want to conquer the United States in the name of art, in the name of affirming benevolence. I want to shout into Canada and hear the snowy forests answer me back with poems and proverbs. I want to write collects and antiphons. I want to expand my available pronouns, he/him/they/them. I want to go back in time and get a mulligan on the ‘90s. I want to be a pair of JB’s socks. But my highschool crush has lain in the grave for lo, these twenty years.
