​"POEM FOR MY FRIEND MATT WHO AT THIS MOMENT IS RUNNING 300 MILES ACROSS TENNESSEE" by Devin Kelly

Originally appearing in Flypaper Poetry Issue I

​​Devin Kelly earned his MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and is the author of two collaborative chapbooks as well as two collections of poetry, Blood on Blood (Unknown Press), and In This Quiet Church of Night, I Say Amen (Civil Coping Mechanisms). His work has been published or is forthcoming in The Guardian, LitHub, Catapult, and more. He is a founding English teacher at Comp Sci High School in the Bronx, and has previously taught at Bronx Community College and The City College of New York. He is the founder and co-host of the Dead Rabbits Reading Series and currently lives in Harlem. He also enjoys extremely sharp cheddar cheese melted atop a medium rare burger.

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POEM FOR MY FRIEND MATT WHO AT THIS MOMENT 
IS RUNNING 300 MILES ACROSS TENNESSEE

The names of towns sound kind enough:
Sugar Tree, Pleasantville, Pine View. 

Once, while running, you turned to me 
& said don’t worry so much about dying –

your brother had been diagnosed
with cancer & I didn’t know. You said

let’s roll & the road became frictionless,
the air beneath a wing, a pillow firmed

before dreaming. What is running
good for? All our lives, old fathers

say stay, work, don’t budge, bear
your own burden. But you know

two people can carry one another
into infinity. How I hope this is 

what infinity is: the carrying multiplied
until it has no number or time, only

a motion so constant it is imperceptible.
That day, the miles were a blur

of miles. You broke away & I chased you
with a grin, the rain caught in my beard,

what was once a marathon no longer,
only the unfound word for both love & rain.

How I felt like a bear. How I want to say 
there is a cure for everything, but how 

I can’t. People tire & people die. Tonight,
while I sleep, you will be shuffling

slowly along Highway Sixty-Four
in the dark, carrying what small load
​
you have left upon your back. For all my life
I have yet to understand what to make

of all my life. I grow scared & anxious with
what I stand to lose & haven’t yet held

in my arms. My first reaction to pain
is instinctive. I crawl within myself,

make of my body a den. I stop, all
shiver & hide, forgetting that there is

nothing to lose after that last, ultimate
loss. I dream my own brother’s death

& wake two inches above the bed
in that last moment of falling. So

we rise. So we go on. So each stride
of yours is twice as long as mine but how

we have learned to cover this distance
at the same time. I’ll stay up late tonight,

track your progress as I would a plane 
arcing over the pollution above Manhattan.

Wasn’t that fun, you said. We had just finished,
the salt of our bodies a desert of white sand

upon our skin. I have run far enough that I can 
say anything. It was, I said. It was, it was, it was.