Conversation
Gary Percesepe

My girlfriend talked like one of the sea people, her voice salt and water, a queer liquid laugh. She’d peek over my shoulder and say: Another poem that’s not about me. Most of us occupy the wrong space in the human parking lot, I’d reply. Alone among the animals we babysit ourselves listening to the shrill music of adolescence of which the less said the better. I sat on the toilet in the lobby bathroom at the Waldorf Astoria for several hours, hiding from her. She came from a small town in Illinois where most of the residents were under house arrest, having misplaced their sliver of luck. I tipped the attendant and strolled outside. Thoughts coursed through my head like scampering mice. In our dreams the poet says we stand on shore for what seems an eternity and it is always the wrong shore.

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