Lexi Vranick
last times.
There was a last time:
we held hands crossing a busy street and your warn, rough palm swallowed mine whole;
we got sea salt in our hair and on our skin and in our bagel shop coffee cups, sitting on
worn wood benches and watching seagulls fight for clam shells and all the treasures
trapped inside -
alphabet letters cluttered your fridge,
numbers in elementary arithmetic, and you taught me how to build them up
to add to two and three and four and five - to ten, to twenty - to multiply
and swept back in cardboard box for the night,
and then the week -
and then a decade, and a second, and maybe they’re in the back
shed now, artifacts of all those snowy afternoons
bowls of soup and saltine crackers and hot chocolate piled with
marshmallows
and whipped cream
And maybe there’s a poetry in all these lasts that we didn’t know were lasts because we were just living in moments and moments and making memories we didn’t know would become
memories
and if I dug up all those fossils of all those times we laughed rib-aching laughs in the leather breakfast nook of your yellow tiled kitchen, would I find ghosts I didn’t know we’d left behind?
Ghosts of all the last times that we said there’d be a next time.
Ghosts of you in glass chess boards and a king with his cracked crown -
in the rusted bones of a broken swing set,
in the mossy plastic playhouse - the purple slide
the toy lawn mower -
all rushing up to make something
that looks like the you I remember
from the last time
we talked.
we held hands crossing a busy street and your warn, rough palm swallowed mine whole;
we got sea salt in our hair and on our skin and in our bagel shop coffee cups, sitting on
worn wood benches and watching seagulls fight for clam shells and all the treasures
trapped inside -
alphabet letters cluttered your fridge,
numbers in elementary arithmetic, and you taught me how to build them up
to add to two and three and four and five - to ten, to twenty - to multiply
and swept back in cardboard box for the night,
and then the week -
and then a decade, and a second, and maybe they’re in the back
shed now, artifacts of all those snowy afternoons
bowls of soup and saltine crackers and hot chocolate piled with
marshmallows
and whipped cream
And maybe there’s a poetry in all these lasts that we didn’t know were lasts because we were just living in moments and moments and making memories we didn’t know would become
memories
and if I dug up all those fossils of all those times we laughed rib-aching laughs in the leather breakfast nook of your yellow tiled kitchen, would I find ghosts I didn’t know we’d left behind?
Ghosts of all the last times that we said there’d be a next time.
Ghosts of you in glass chess boards and a king with his cracked crown -
in the rusted bones of a broken swing set,
in the mossy plastic playhouse - the purple slide
the toy lawn mower -
all rushing up to make something
that looks like the you I remember
from the last time
we talked.
Biography
Lexi Vranick is an independent poet and fiction author residing on Long Island, New York. She holds a B.A. in Literature from Excelsior College, where she completed her undergraduate thesis on cultural perceptions of mental illness in literature. She is the author of three self-published titles in poetry and short form fiction. Her work has been published in the Fly on the Wall Poetry Press anthology Please Hear What I’m Not Saying, Cagibi, Peculiars Magazine, and Soft Cartel. She is the founding editor of Little Lion Literary. When she is not writing, Lexi enjoys fiddling with cameras, advocating for mental health awareness, and trying to find the legs in a glass of merlot.