“Before Crandale” by Jessie Lin, XII: poetry

before crandale

- Jessie Lin, XII: poetry before crandale we lived in a one bedroom apartment with six windows, two of which faced a brick wall with bird crap running down the cracks like egg whites, liquidy like the kind we ate for breakfast on sunday afternoons

when we slept in for far too long in mismatched sheets and duvets and the knit blanket your dead grandmother made us for christmas (the woman whose necklace sits in the hollow of my throat,

the same place you would press your lips on nights the rain pounded against our rickety fire escape and drowned out my breaths along the back of your earlobe)

and you still struggled to separate reds and whites in the laundry and i took self-timer photographs of us dancing to television static

and you would take my right hand whisper of painted brownstones two children and a gray kitten

and all the wonderful things

that never came

after. still.