"POEM FOR MY FRIEND MATT WHO AT THIS MOMENT IS RUNNING 300 MILES ACROSS TENNESSEE" by Devin Kelly8/21/2019 ![]() 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. 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.
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