Fire Escape

Connor Douglas Rice

Yannick and I had no problem falling in love

during the pandemic. It's been two months to the day

since he sent me a GIF of an astronaut waving,

their body tethered to a space station orbiting Earth,

and one month to the day since we first met in person,

in the lobby of my building where we would spend

four days together. He was dressed in head-to-toe denim

and a face mask, behind which was a panic attack,

and in his hands were yellow and purple flowers,

the colors of my voice, and all the ingredients to prepare

chocolate chip cookies, minus one egg.

We can't go on dates, so we spend our time

on the fire escape, smoking weed and watching the light

seep out of the eastward sky between two rows

of apartment buildings. The tree that grows

from the concrete between the apartments,

five stories tall and flourishing in the narrowness of the alley,

is beginning to lose its leaves. Watch

the beating of pigeons’ wings as they slow,

their changing angles as they pump air forward like a brake

to light upon a red iron railing. Watch

the pigeon in freefall—Wile E. Coyote—wings

clasped at its sides until the last moment,

the limit of suicide's failed parabola, when they unfold

to arc it suddenly upward to land safely out of view.

Though it continues to benefit the few

at the expense of the many, this world is no one's dream.

There will be lost jobs and rare blood diseases,

pizza and polvorones, frigid rain, ash clouds migrating

from fires out west, a vacancy on the Supreme Court,

good sex, finally, and bad memories,

a new scale to measure pain,

a caterpillar with a name emerging from its fallen chrysalis

with wings too deformed for flight,

nights spent holding each other like stones

clinging to their crystals, the yellowed leaves

of a houseplant I can't figure out, plucked

so the nutrients flow to where it's greenest.