Calvin Fantone only eats cereal out of teacups.   He earned a B.A. in Creative Writing from CSULB and enjoys having long conversations with himself.   When he isn’t writing, he can be found daydreaming about robots, dinosaurs, time travel, and friendly monsters that hail from foreign lands.

Two Poems (November 20, 2011. Issue 33.)

Direction

I will remember you
like a rooster
at the dead of dawn
-Katie Prow

When people ask
how I remember you,
I will tell them
I remember slow dancing in the rain,
shuffling our shoes
through puddles in the dark
until the water
soaked through our soles.

I will tell them
how while everyone else held hands,
we rubbed our feet together instead.
How the stories of our travels
became intertwined through our toes.

I'll remember navigating
your body in the cool glow
of dusk, my fingertips tracing
your birthmarks and bruises
as I carved maps
of your skin
into memory.

I'll remember the night
my car spun like a drunken ballerina
on the freeway and shattered
everything I knew about balance.
I'll remember how you wrenched me
from the wreckage
and tried to rebuild my sense
of direction.

But
I will not remember the tiny switchblade
you kept hooked to your keychain.
I will not remember how the steel
felt almost as cold as your voice
when you told me you just didn't know
where this was going anymore
and I will not remember discovering
how much I couldn't stand
being lost.

Tiny Details

Dear first love,

You are lavender and firewood. A tattered pair of old Chucks with the laces too tight. You are faded photo booth strips and the last Ferris wheel ride before closing. You are treasure hunts through Acres of Books and then a bunch of beat up copies of Wuthering Heights. You are piles upon piles of my poorly made mixtapes: not enough rising and too much falling, falling, falling. You are teenage initials carved into tree trunks. Handwritten love letters hidden in drawers. You are too much coffee before bedtime and cold weather shivers—no, no, no, you are warm, summertime joyrides down Pacific Coast highway: wind in my face and traces of sand on my seats. You are tiny details, tiny details, tiny details. And you will always be wrapped up in my favorite jacket, always be Cure records stuck on repeat. You'll always be junk food comas in the late afternoon, mint chip ice cream stains all over my clothes. And we'll always be sitting on swing sets just before sundown, always still swinging even after it's gone.