Keep your jaded scowls,
I’ll take the awe-struck owls.
Keep your Italian-made suits,
I’ll take the Timberland boots.
Keep your 3AM ‘open’ signs,
I’ll take the well-rested sunrise.
Keep your steel-rung rat race (and all the rats)
I’ll take the unstrung pace and summer gnats.
Keep your millions of scared-to-grow-up Peter Pans,
and I’ll take my one proudly grounded Midwest man.
She didn’t like the space-efficient way the editors had typed the poem, or how they’d cut her favorite couplet, rhymingbedroom half-wallswithroomy bathroom stalls. She wished her name was there but was glad it wasn’t. The piece wasn’t good enough for her to claim it, and the last thing she needed was people at work finding out she wrote love poems for the local paper. It would threaten all the workshe’d put in over the years to prove she was a serious businesswoman, not a cute little girl.
Still, there was a certain comfort in knowing that if she died today, she’d have put a few words out into the world beyond scraps and drafts and halves.
Earlier today, Ellen, from her Hawaii honeymoon, had texted the link to the Scramblettes.
LOOK RAE IS FAMOUS (though I do have to take credit for the Post-it Poet name …)
I need your autograph!!Sarah had replied a few hours later.
It’s so amazing,Mina had added.I’m going to write a poem like this for Ryan!!!Ryan was Mina’s latest obsession. She’d collided with him in the stairwell of her apartment building, presumably because her nose had been buried in her phone.
The Scramblette bond had surged to old highs at Ellen’s picture-perfect wedding last week. Ellen had convinced Rae to bring Stu, whom the Scramblettes had deemed as scrumptious as the cupcakes.
“Proudly grounded Midwest man,” Stu said now, wrapping Rae from behind as they reread the poem together. “That’s me.”
Rae tried to smile, but it got stuck halfway, and she was glad Stu didn’t have a view of her face. Her emotions were twisting around themselves in some kind of difficult knot. “That’s you,” she said.
“Ready to head out? You can give me and Marlene a private reading on the way over.”
Rae’s mom was hosting a celebratory dinner party, which her grandpa had agreed to attend so long as Rae promised not to quit her job to become a starving artist.
Her chest felt like it was being stepped on, and she ached for a gulp of fresh air from an eighth-story rooftop. “I have to water the plant first,” she heard herself say.
She filled a glass of water and walked into the living room, where a houseplant with heart-shaped leaves was sprawling in the window, in a spot that collected indirect sunlight.
After Stu had discovered Rae’s aversion to cut flowers, he’d asked what her favorite potted flower was. She’d accidentally responded “Philodendrons,” which wasn’t even a flower, and Stu had brought one over the next day.
Now Rae dumped water on the dried-out soil, watching it seep through the bottom of the green pot, which had more holes than she’d realized. She took one of the newspapers and rested it underneath. The runoff smudged the poem in a way that added the literary character it had been lacking.
A fidget appeared, or rather reappeared, to text the poem to Dustin.
She still hadn’t heard from him once since the breakup—a year ago yesterday. Not even one drunk text.
He rarely entered her thoughts anymore, but he never left them. It was so much easier to keep someone out of your conscious thoughts than it was to kick them out of your subconscious, she was learning. He remained a stubborn hum in her heart, never fully in focus but never out of focus either.
He wouldn’t like the poem, of course, but she wanted to show that at least she’d donesomething, that her writing had IPO’d in the public markets and all those days poem spotting at Brooklyn cafés hadn’t completely gone to waste. She wanted to thank him for keeping her creative muscles alive and argue with him about why rhymes weren’t cheap. And above everything, but below it, too, she needed to know how he was doing.
“What’s wrong?” Stu asked, from across the room.
