"My Friends" by Michael Battisto

Michael Battisto has work that can be found or forthcoming in The Normal School, HAD, Poet Lore, The Shore, MoonPark Review, and elsewhere. He has lived in many places, but now he lives in Oakland. You can find him on Twitter @mbattisto3 or @michaelbattisto.com. ​

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My Friends


My friends and I exchanged dead fathers
until our smiles were the same. We drove
through old songs to other states to find
what the midnight there meant. Expecting
our bodies to be bankrupt by thirty
we pawned our arteries and stomachs
for chemical epiphanies. We might fast
for a week to buy tickets to stripped
auditoriums, where the music slowed us
into the present tense. We sold seats
to canceled concerts and smoked our guilt
with the profit. We borrowed each others
clothes and partners and beds and confessed
our shame through relapses, then slept
on the nude floors of stranger’s houses.
We listed our dissonances on the walls
of our ashtray apartments. We snorted
cocaine off stolen exit signs and made sure
no one went. Eric and Chris play-fought
with knives and threatened to let the other
win. We were children humming our
innocence and hammering on ourselves
with fists. We bought cigarettes instead
of food whenever we could and predicted
when each other’s bodies would end.
In our conversations we declared silence
obscene, and left blank pages in our hidden
diaries for our friends to write helpless
commentaries and promises we
almost believed we would keep.