ERIC TRAN

Regrets, in the Style of Clue

Your ex at Home Depot with the mower

blades and your cut off jeans, or mom

in the dark garage, her face blossomed

plum, or teen at clinic and his chipped

pink polish, or the sober Juggalo

at Red Cross and a matte black BB gun.

The psychic by the door and spirits

urging, Trust him. Dan on the bridge

without wallet or phone, or yourself

on the bridge with the bag of chips.

Your coach and the veins and callous

grip and the No man lifts

because he’s happy. Speech started

and sputtered dead under the swing

of a single bulb, or the drag queen

denude of shadow and dress with the trust

fall to bed, or from his studio the city

behind the quilted curtains, or any black

in your vision. Dan in the cookie aisle

and a tin of durian straws, with the ten-speed

in the quad and floodlights, with the snap-

back in the gyms, with a keychain,

with the triceps, with the dumplings,

with the train set in the snowstorm,

with the statuesque man in the city,

in the sun, in the closet, in a doorway,

in a room that smells of laundry or copper.

Eric Tran is the author of the chapbooks Revisions (forthcoming from Sibling Rivalry Press) and Affairs with Men in Suits (Backbone Press). He is the winner of the 2015 New Delta Review Matt Clark Prose Award and was a finalist in the 2015 Indiana Review 1/2K Prize and the Tinderbox Poetry Prize. His work appears in or is forthcoming in Diagram, Indiana Review, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere. He is a medical student at the University of North Carolina and holds an MFA from UNCW. For more, visit veryerictran.com.