Come Pick Up Your Boots and Where We Left Off
Kami Enzie | Poetry
Trees live parenthetical to my body.
I put your shoes on over my socks,
And walk in your old boots across snow beds,
Passing under armpits of trees smooth as beech.
Tall, hairless punks like the boys we had been.
Late March, marooned in flat sheets, two black boys
Loitered on mattress stains traced by moon’s blacklight.
We rode that valley like a soul outside flesh.
Rode down our first bodies like soil wants the dead.
Now snow coats streets like looks gave it the right.
White coats coax that old loneliness you left
Set in wax and leather slings as if to heal.
Sick in wait for your long hands to grasp its heels.
Your limbs and trunk parenthetical to mine.
Kami Enzie (he/him), a Vienna-born, New Orleans-raised queer Nigerian-Filipino writer, is a recent Iowa MFA grad. His work appears, or will soon, in Black Warrior Review, Chicago Review, Common Place, fourteen poems, The Glacier, Obsidian, Oversound, The Poetry Review, and elsewhere. He is an alumnus of Tin House Winter Workshops, VCFA’s Postgraduate Writers’ Conference, and 2024 winner of the poetry contest for the Tennessee Williams & New Orleans Literary Festival. IG/X: @yungwerther