Graffiti love poem
Earring become offramps
into tags that expand
the pretenses of flatness.
Shape, in its lines
makes a hefty jacket
that bend and defy
in what it hides.
Cuban chains hold
episode portals
in their private language
of courtship.
Plastic ring jewels
raise their light to the sky.
Plastic press-ons
sheath and mold their neon.
Swap meet headphones
linger over her head
among swirls and swirls
of notes.
By the offramps
she lingers on the concrete side.
The rain and the dirt water
repeat their winter rhythm
structures and bases
raised and crumbled
turn away more than they mirror.
Rubble in the lot.
Is the conceit of the inevitable,
but what is felt and witnessed
will endure.
Robert Lashley was a 2016 Jack Straw Fellow, Artist Trust Fellow, and a nominee for a Stranger Genius Award. His books include Green River Valley (Blue Cactus Press, 2021), Up South (Small Doggies Press, 2017), and The Homeboy Songs (Small Doggies Press, 2014). His poetry has appeared in The Seattle Review of Books, Poetry Northwest, McSweeneys, and the anthologies Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry and Cascadian Zen: Bioregional Writings on Cascadia Here and Now. In 2019, Entropy Magazine named The Homeboy Songs one of the twenty-five essential books to come out of Seattle. His novel I Never Dreamed You’d Leave in Summer was selected as a finalist for a 2024 Washington State Book Award in Fiction (Demersal Publishing, 2024), and in 2025, the novel was selected as one of Bookshop.org’s 30 favorite Black books in the last ten years. He lives in Bellingham, Washington.
Header photo by Bastian Riccardi, courtesy Pixabay.
