Lawrence Bridges

Accent Removal

There is a sphere wrapped in blankets
where I no longer go. It’s in my heart.
Good memories sleep there. Joshua Trees
playing tag through the side windows of the car,   
laughing, tangled in a ball with no arms and legs,
cooking naked in the desert with the new 
camping stove and standing in the middle
of my high school’s quad, kissing: 
Now you can say you had a girlfriend in high school!
I can walk around the sphere and startle myself
with its occasional beats, best forgotten,
with a burning feeling mounting behind my eyes
but the sphere itself burns with one last
flame of fiery phantoms releasing me
You still d your t’s and say her and I?
The rest isn’t worth explaining.
You will just say she lingered before she fled.

Lawrence Bridges' poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, and Tampa Review. He has published three volumes of poetry: Horses on Drums (Red Hen Press, 2006), Flip Days (Red Hen Press, 2009), and Brownwood (Tupelo Press, 2016). You can find him on IG: @larrybridges