an afternoon

by Noah Uitermark

in the brutal
winter
inside a lit
table where
friends told
me to chase
her,
I’d never
given it thought
before

but she seems to like
you, they said,
and right then
love seemed
so impossible
and real

and we shivered
to our cars and
hurried home,
the blankets warm,
where the little pets
were blinking
their tired eyes
awake

that girl went
to Germany
as my face
grew dusty
and the bathroom
door
fell apart

we don’t know anything
about what’s next

helpless, we stutter
and stammer the words
through the narrow scope
of our eyes

and all we have
are the strange,
surprising,
golden few
hours in
the long run
of the dismal
era, the
dawn of
surgery
and machines.

so i’ll see
you
tomorrow, as
we wait
for the bus

i won’t have
anything
to say.

dusty villa and a few cans of beer

by Noah Uitermark

slow night in the desert,
bar man politely excuses himself
to throw up pure liquor
after a night before,
some other story
long forgotten
and thrown away.

a quiet glowing night,
the lap girl itches her blue
crotch
and there’s no one around
the stage.

the music plays on, and
everyone realizes that no one really
likes these songs.

it’s a slow night, they suck
from their bottles and cans
and the girls wiggle impatiently
in their tight tight
pants
and the underwear throbbing
their crotch.

the television plays scrambled,
the strip from the comics
hangs helplessly on the wall,
and the jukebox rests
untouched.

they all wanted us to be happy,
really,
but now we’re here
and this dusty villa had grown on us.

beercans line the coffee tables by our
feet and the taste of bad cigarettes
have somehow grown on us.

the sun goes down behind a veil
of horizon blue,

the conversation is light and sparse,
full and absent
of meaning,

and the parting paths are taken.

it’s a slow night in this villa, a night
like any other month and all the
other years.

the lap girls get up to stretch and
the crowd, craving their love,
orders one more round

we just don’t know

what else to do.

gritty plaza rainbow

by Noah Uitermark

my mother then,
she was a broken soul in a concave apartment

and i was six years old

she worked at the convenience store
across the street
and i would come in for nickel-candy
and the chance to see her,
a true warrior
of the christian blood and
the american job.

i was six,
and when she came home,
she would throw her nametag onto the
littered coffee table,

she would light a cigarette
and later on that night,
i knew,
would come the drinks.

we had a red recliner chair
and i was a ninja
in practice
waiting to pounce

there was a man she sometimes
talked to in the hallway,
he read shakespeare
and wanted to do things
with her
but he never had the courage
to ask

i saw a gritty plaza rainbow
and i chose to run my tricycle off
the edge of the sidewalk
in search of the gold
at the end.

at nine mom was drunk and
she had to be up at eight the next day
and things were going alright for
us.

we needed no help and no outside
voice,
except,
i saw the plaza rainbow
and that day I swore to
find the end. I got
on my tricycle
headed
behind the horizon,
past the speed limit signs
and the lazy Sunday cops
through the water mirages
and the setting
Midwestern sun.

I decided to leave her in
search of that rainbow,
and I’ve never come back.

what we’ve been doing with ourselves

by Noah Uitermark

the three of us sat together,
at an old coffee house at
the edge of the highway and
rotted interstate ramps.

the place was a month away
from dark abandonment and the
long years of slow decay-
but we were there nevertheless,
2 stupid boys and a
girl. they

talked about
an old actor. i
drank black coffee.

the barista behind the
counter was shy, pale-
complexioned and cute

i wanted to walk
around as an object
in her eyes
for a little while,
see how that
might feel.

but she was reading the
newspaper, not far
away from a copy
of a famous Dickens
book.

i’d heard too many jokes
about that one, i was
ignorant and couldn’t
bring myself to pick
up anything
that everyone else
had already heard
of and loved.

i drank more
black coffee,
turned my eyes across
the photographs and
portrait sketches
on the walls.

there was light jazz,
i remember that, and
the aimless traffic
at our backs.

there was the straggling
insistence of a few
loners, drifters, and
social miscreants.
they read too,
or wrote, or stared
dully at the
walls.

there were really few
places to be as
the city suffocated
each night by
the waning firelight
of the leaving
sun

what i really
wanted
was to start
talking to them
about our crazy love
and how it had
just
died,

but i got few
looks, a mention
of never getting called

and i let the subject
naturally turn from
the old actor to
even worse
things

well, it didn’t matter
i bled,
inside,
finished the last of
the coffee, crunching
the grounds
and i thought
maybe now i’ll
have something
to say to
that quiet
and pretty
girl-

she read the newspaper
as if it truly
enthralled her,
sitting on one leg
on a stool
and leaned over
like it contained
the story of the
rest of her
life.

hers and the rest
of our lives were
always a
fickle thing,

so the sun went slowly down
as thoughts turned
to the bar.

the traffic thinned out
and headlights unevenly
came to pierce
the solemn evening
blue.

nothing changed, nothing
grew
and the
ceiling fans
hummed along
so
when the time came
i gathered up a
few things,
left some change
at the bar,
and walked
out through
the door.

gray clouds covered
the sky,
a future cried out
and no one
wept.

i would fight some
coffee dreams while
the pretty girl
swept the floor
and closed down
all the lights.

my friends would
go somewhere else,
some chatty field

and you would not
answer your
cell phone,
resting instead on
a new boy’s
couch.