Courtney Cook is an MFA candidate at the University of California, Riverside, and a graduate of the University of Michigan. She has been published in the Cerurove, the Manifest-Station, Thought Catalog, and Soapvox, and is the winner of a Hopwood Award in Nonfiction.
BAY BLUES
i.
We sparked a joint called Tango Haze, supposedly a “focused in the head, daytime high”, as I drank an orange La Croix and you a root beer. It was sunny and surprisingly windy at the top of Dolores Park, and I felt I could see all of San Francisco. I kept thanking you for spending time with me, like you were giving me a gift, even though I had paid for the hotel we were staying in for the weekend. Earlier in the day we ate chicken sandwiches and I told you I loved pickles as much as you hated them, and you said I could always have yours, which felt like a small declaration of love.
ii.
I wished for us to be arrested. I wanted to sit with our backs pressed together, hold cuffed hands in the back of a police car, to feel your pulse race through your fingertips into mine. I pictured the officer, dough bellied and bored, reciting us our rights, and the way you’d bite your lip to keep from smiling. I wanted you to be excited by the arrest, anxious but turned on. Even though nearly everyone in the park was smoking, we’d be the ones to be singled out, taken away in front of all the picnickers and sunbathers and stoners. I wanted everyone to stare and know that we were together. I wanted public record to link us. Something to last forever.
iii.
We had sex and slept with our window open. No screen, salty and cold air blowing at the curtains and letting the street lights in like shooting stars. Before you woke up, I took a Polaroid of you in bed, your mouth open slightly and your cheek pressed into a pillow, spooning the blankets. I wished a ghost was there to take the photo and that instead of the blankets you were holding me. You woke up when the flash went off and I noticed you had mosquito bites along both your arms. I told you that you must taste sweet, sweeter than me, because I didn’t have any. Then you drove me to the ferry station and kissed me before I got out of the car, and I hoped that their itching would remind you of me. That you’d scratch at them too much and they’d scar.
TAHOE
We’re in a forest on the border
of California and Nevada, tearing
into a loaf of bread. Cigarettes
like small campfires in our hands.
Still cold. No reception. A fishhook lost
in the cabin’s welcome mat, then halfway
in my heel. We wait for Polaroids to develop,
win money then put it back down on the table.
He pushes me into the middle of the lake,
picks up floating trash and throws it away
once we reach land. There are so many
things we can’t bring home; so much
we must leave behind.
