Thanh Bui: ex-smoker calendar
Photo: Joanna C. Valente
ex-smoker calendar
6. you had stopped lighting up
long before we met. only kept a little blue
box of smokes for the bad days & watched
us kiss from outside your body.
1. hello again. i remember
it all unraveling for you
& coming together for me
3. a lot of good things happened that first
week: i made callbacks & bought a new skirt, you
asked the wrong person permission to kiss me
but it happened anyway & for the first time,
reflection asked: is this what it’s like
to be someone else’s?
2. often, i wonder if we actually met
each other’s time-swapped selves instead-
as if some things happen in forwards &
others reverse & they
don’t really meet
until we did.
8. you remember how it ended, right?
5. one night we were practicing, you
in staying and me in selflessness. i
felt soft hands interrupt my deep-dive.
you pulled me up to face & thanked
me with quiet admittance,
revealed you wanted to
stop. when i asked,
you apologized;
said the blow
felt lonely
9. months after, i saw you buying salad mix
& ran to cry in the greeting card section
7. yes, time must not have settled
right when we overlapped.
10. i had a birthday & learned to cum
the summer you never came back
from
4. once, you accidentally said ‘i love you’
& got so upset about it i had to comfort
you on the floor. i laughed so much
12. i remember it all coming together for you
and unraveling for me. goodbye,
it’s a pleasure to meet you
11. the new boy loves me in the way
you must’ve wanted to flee from. it’s not
that i feel undeserving, i just know now
what kissing looks like
from above the body.
*the author would like to note that this poem sometimes goes by a second name, “5:27 a.m.,” which represents a date as well as a time when two hands meet on a clock
Born in Saigon and raised in Boston and Houston, Thanh Bui is a writer & actor currently based out of Austin, Texas. Her work has appeared in The Offing, Cosmonauts Avenue, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, FIVE:2:ONE, Crab Fat Magazine, FreezeRay Poetry, diaCRITICS, The Sunlight Press, and other places accessible to her mom. She loves constantly.
