Why Don’t You Dry Off After You Shower?
Michael Meyerhofer

asked the pretty blonde in my dorm
the semester I almost hung myself
from the stairwell with an extension cord,
partly because of a dead mother
and a weak bladder, still years before
a masked woman dipped a scalpel in the dark,
but mostly because I wasn’t getting laid.
I don’t remember what I told her,
though I suspect I simply liked the appearance
of sauntering in from the rain,
a little wild-eyed, friendless
but perfectly fine, like the Zen monks
I’d read about, and not another lonesome kid
obsessed with the thickness of his biceps.
Which reminds me of an afternoon
walking back from a physics lecture
when the clouds opened up and everybody
but me ran—everybody but me and this
plain-faced girl walking the other way,
her hair like tarnished gold,
both of us smiling as we passed
each other, too afraid to say hello.

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