CHAD BENNETT

How to Live Together

No cloud. No leaves

trying their reddest

in some blunt wind.

No world lit up

just so by this rain

and no rain, even.

I resolve: no more

phone calls after your

voice this morning

popped its digital

bubble and you kept

trying to talk

while I kept trying

to think all things

are real—cloud, leaf,

red, wind, rain, phone,

hello: why are there

no tears in this

poem? I fucking

want to cry. I think

a poem is like

Andy Warhol who

said, “I’m shy, yet

like to take up

a lot of personal

space.” Days have passed

with their different

weathers. I don’t know

how many times

I’ve rewritten these

stubbornly banal

last lines. I think

I’ll respect their

banality, how what

I didn’t say then

I’m saying to you

here where it matters

even less yet takes

up so much more.

Your Fade-Out Is a Tiny Philosophy but No Less True for That

your only

teachers

are the movies

and lovers

and lovers

are like movies

only old ones

stir desire

Chad Bennett’s poems have appeared in journals such as Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Fence, jubilat, The Offing, and The Volta. He is an assistant professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of Word of Mouth: Gossip and American Poetry (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), a study of the relationship between modern American poetry and the queer art of gossip.