Jenn Koiter

Reading Tour

for Craig Arnold and Jake York

Two poets go on a road trip. This is not a joke,
though there is laughter. It is a good road trip,
maybe the best road trip, were it possible
to measure such things.

Both poets are tall and beautiful,
which always helps. They are both smart.
They know things. And because
they inhabit the same strange sub-subculture
that is American poetry in the early aughts,
they have enough in common
to make conversation easy, yet
enough difference to keep things interesting.
They stop somewhere and read poems, then drive
and stop and read poems. It is heaven.
Also they have dried figs, five pounds of them,
and they eat them for three days straight.

One of the poets will lose himself so well
we cannot find him. (This is not a metaphor.)
The other’s body will betray him
suddenly, irredeemably.
They will both be unlucky, at the end.

But on this road trip, they are the luckiest.
They have found each other, and in each other, taste
friendship’s bright tang and slow ferment.
They will each tell the story of it for years.

It’s not really a story. Just two friends becoming
better friends, which is a not-story worth telling
over and over, even, perhaps especially, now,
when there is no one left on earth who remembers
the taste of those figs.

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Jenn Koiter’s poems and essays have appeared in Smartish Pace, Bateau, Barrelhouse, Ruminate, Rock & Sling and other journals. She lives in Washington, DC with three gerbils named Sputnik, Cosmo, and Unit.