Tuscaloosa Contacts
Drew, who ten years ago drank underage
and was chased by police into a cornfield.
They let him go
since he ditched his license from Ontario,
84 etched into 81,
and said “you boys came a long way
to make a whole lot of trouble.”
Erik and Nathanael, whom I met
at the College English Association conference
in Indianapolis, Indiana, during
the governorship of Mike Pence.
That day the pizza-shop guy apologized
for Pence’s anti-gay law when he served me,
both our nametags shining,
sitting by myself without a phone.
Drew’s sister Hayley, who was there for school
and then hired as a professor of kinesiology.
I met Hayley only once, on Skype,
but another time ate burgers
with Drew’s other sister, Erin, and Emily,
the day she presented on
the social construction of crazy
and lost it herself at that conference.
Whoever rejected my poems
at the Black Warrior
Review. Fuck you.
Nan, whom I briefly dated in Montreal,
who wrote a romance novel set there,
where her mom Lynne teaches English.
I dumped Nan over Facebook
and then she blocked me, but I kept
her novel, Ellie Draft 6.doc.
Maury’s cousin, a professor of astronomy,
who at a holiday dinner refused
to believe Clinton lost,
blaming either Russia,
making a whole lot of trouble a long way away,
or else the Electoral College,
invalidating one more romantic vote
cast alone in Tuscaloosa.