Courtney Felle | do you want me to leave? | Glass: A Journal of Poetry

Courtney Felle (she/they) lives between Western New York and rural Ohio. More of their writing can be found in Half Mystic Press, The Ellis Review, L’Éphémère Review, and Chautauqua Journal, among other publications. She edits Body Without Organs Literary Journal and interns for the Kenyon Review. They are a big fan of tea, breakfast food, long road trips, and ultra-specific Spotify playlists.

Courtney Felle on Twitter

Also by Courtney Felle: an hour from the end of 2018, I tell my friend G and my ex W that 2019 is right here tu-lips International Women’s Day 2019 and I Did Not Die

Previously in Glass: A Journal of Poetry: Self-Portrait In My Defense

September 2020

Courtney Felle

do you want me to leave?

with you i am not a yardstick tapping a class desk, i am not a tangerine half-peeled in a picnic basket, i am not a purple- blackberry soda flattening in the sun. instead, i am a girl fanning her skin with a paper plate, purchasing skeins of yarn at the craft store, flattering the cracks in the side- walk how only girls in love can. i imagine myself the park pathways unspooling before us, the empty ice buckets in an abandoned hotel, the linen pillowcases your mother likes. i want to know why the company discontinued our favorite soda as we stand in the road, trying to say goodnight across all the dead coral reefs. without blackberry & purple there are no fish to love, & pulling plastic from the ocean leaves it empty. no more opposites. i am not asking when you will leave because i have studied how every observation hurries its end, & still our arms stick tightly together like a stack of paper plates that won’t come loose. we say, i swear this is the last time, but we both know this is a half- peeled lie, we’re basket cases, we’re cruel how only people in love can be. if i were a time: tuesday. if i were an animal: two tigers with antlers on strings, cardboard birthday hats for a party no one invited us to. always asking for more. driving away, i still want two sodas for the road. i measure the grass blades & the sticks on the suburban yards. i park in the abandoned hotel lot & unspool, prune. i tap my skin, fanning, flattering, flattening. i weave baskets of yarn. i peel the companies from their sidewalks & their cracks & i empty the ice into the linen pillow- cases. i fill my own ocean. soon, i’ll hit halfway home.

Driving home from my ex’s house in June 2019, over a year into a post-breakup “friendship” that hinged on both continued vulnerability and a continued denial of that vulnerability, I started saying aloud everything that I had been refusing. Using speech-to-text, I sent it as a message to myself, and I let all the words and images come without filtering what made narrative sense. The resulting mishmash of images included small, daily details I didn’t realize I was ascribing such symbolic importance (blackberry soda), made-up moments in a fantasy life of togetherness (linen pillowcases), and a deep sense of dread for what always feels, underlying any individual melodrama I have, like a larger, impending end of the world (un-empty oceans). It all felt precarious, trying to undo changes instead of moving beyond them to a better future, nostalgic and anticipatory and unstable at once. Looking back now during the COVID-19 pandemic and a time of open national reckoning about racial, economic, and environmental injustice, this kind of public vs. private hurt and questioning about how we break our own patterns only feels more relevant in my memory.

< Previous (Rachel Grace Mussenden)Next (Mamie Morgan) >