Poems by Drew Buxton
Taker’s Walk
for The Undertaker
Big brother, with firecrackers and a box of scorpions,
with a pocket full of loose Swedish Fish, me following blindly in the infinite summer days,
too hot to think always following dumb.
(Big brother, what got into us on your birthday, the night Dad let us have two Cokes and we couldn’t sleep and we tiptoed down to the cellar and you dared me to peek into the rosewood casket with the gold handles?)
Just how did you get up without waking me, find the bottles, work your way through the house?
Sneak!— how did you strike a match and step out and not look back,
step out alone into the desert night I wanted to feel so bad and for so long,
the night we said we’d walk into together, the night we agreed on after Uncle Paul drove us to Bakersfield in his Studebaker, and Mil Mascaras pinned Super Scorpion 1, 2, 3,
the one that had us suplexing off beds and couches, the one that made me cry and Mom yell.
(In Death Valley, the cooking summer threatening to keep us from our night forever, yes, summer again, those days when Dad was busy down in the cellar.)
Undertaker, what is your act but a shudder from one of your nightmares when Mom gave you microwaved milk and snored next to you on the bottom bunk?
Who was I to not accept the smoke and to fight through the window and fill my lungs with our night
but a stubborn boy?
Lug, you too! You thief in the night! You big bully!
after Sexton
Nobody Around You
Bobby has a mouth full of onion ring, and his phone keeps buzzing, so he is distracted. He’s not paying attention to me talking about how Jenn, my only bagel, ghosted me. “Sorry, man. It’s just I got a new bee in the hive,” he says.
I don’t know if it was intentional. If you don’t respond to a message within 48 hours, the bagel disappears from your chats, but if you pay 150 beans, you can get them back. You get 1000 beans free when you first sign up, but now I’m down to my last 64.
Bobby has a job and credit card. He doesn’t like Jack in the Box, but he meets me here because it’s what I can afford, and I’m too stubborn to let him pay for me. When Bobby runs out of beans, with one touch, he buys 8000 more for $49.99.
Why do a select few bagels have more beans than they could ever spend, while so many of us have less beans than toes on our feet?
When a chat dies, and I have no other chats going, I feel so alone and envious of people I hear about who died in accidents and shootings.
When you run out of people to swipe on on Tinder, it shows your face, tiny, in the middle of a white screen, with text that says, “There’s no one new around you.” Sometimes it says that when I’m swiping and eating egg rolls and french toast in the Jack in the Box dining room, late at night, all alone except for the high school worker watching and waiting for me to leave so he can start mopping the floor.
I heard about a guy who, after getting unmatched, took a bath with a toaster.
Walking home after a bad Coffee Meets Bagel date, my friend’s friend stepped in front of an 18-wheeler. He texted my friend right before and said that his date had only answered his questions and never asked him any.
I do anything I can to stay alive. I eat, jerkoff, and sleep. Sleep is the best way to wait it out, even though you hate that you wake up.
I can either eat six tacos tonight or extend my chat with Jenn for another 48 hours. Just 2000 beans would get me a large curly fry and large chocolate milkshake, or a Sourdough Jack and a slice of cheesecake. At Jack in the Box, they understand that even people without money deserve variety. Maybe she’s just been busy and truly meant to respond. She might light up when she sees she’s been given another shot, but I might come off as desperate and ruin my shot with her later on other apps, if she reappears in my life as a bee or a flame.
It could be a crazy story we tell our kids about how close it came to never happening, how close they were to not existing, how I almost traded it all for a box of loaded tiny tacos.
How the despair will multiply though, if she ignores me again while my belly rumbles.
A lot of them write on their profiles that they don’t know why they’re on the app, but I know why. It’s the loneliness.
At least I’m aware and know what I want. I want someone who, when they write “Happy B-Day!” on my Facebook timeline, puts more into it than that, and writes an inside joke with it for everyone to see, maybe even an insult. I want someone who knows before Facebook tells them. I want them to ask me in real life when it is and then stop to add it to their Google calendar.
Drew is a social worker from Texas. His work has been featured in Joyland, Hobart, Vice, and Vol. 1 Brooklyn among other publications. Find him at drewbuxton.com