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Illuminating poetry since 1959

Posted on | Poetry

People Like Me

by

"In the mirror, I see two asymmetrical halves of a face. In my dreams, these halves turn to you to say, why don’t we throw a party. In Barcelona I walked to the beach alone and rode the elevator up an apartment tower where I stared into my own eyes in the mirror. I used to take photos in the mirror for you to see. In my dreams, the apartment would burn down, and I would die, and you would cry about it forever. While I slept, a woman talked endlessly on the phone while she hung her laundry over the air shaft, saying loudly what I couldn’t understand. The air shaft was like a drawing of Hell as described by Dante. I could hear behind her the sound of Spanish television. I never read Dante’s Inferno, but I watched many episodes of Pasapalabra. I love to see someone winning, someone getting what they want. I want to be a partier; I am probably just a drinker. Not being a partier is like never growing up, which is like not existing. You tell me I bring something else into the world. I am the one who takes you to see another movie where Paul Mescal plays a beautiful man dying of sadness. We go to another party and drink. I tell you my greatest wish is to at least be a beautiful man who is dying from sadness. I will settle for being a character in a film about people like me. People who are always flinging ourselves into the ocean in hopes that someone will say, wait, I love you. A film where you are looking in your own eyes in the mirror and you don’t see me in the ocean because, as we learned from the signs at the beach, a drowning head just looks like a head. We sat on a couch together at a party. I was too high to speak but something was said between us, I think. We looked in the mirror above the fireplace where there was no fire, both of us looking at ourselves looking at ourselves. Tomorrow I will try to look at you first."

Katana Smith’s poems have appeared in The Paris Review, RHINO, AGNI, and elsewhere. She lives in Chicago.

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