The old misogynist poet asked if he could lean on my shoulder
as we filed across the courtyard to the lecture hall,
and I let him.

I could hear his lungs
pull at him, twin vodkas
clanking in the dark
plastic bag he clutched in his other hand.

Thank you, little girl,
he said, once we were pinned
inside under the fluorescent glare.

And now he’s dead.

I sit on my roof one night and acknowledge
him with my arms closed.

Maybe death is just
an elevator
where no one can touch
or be touched.

Robin Myers is a Mexico City-based poet and translator. Recent translations include Cars on Fire by Mónica Ramón Ríos (Open Letter Books), The Restless Dead by Cristina Rivera Garza (Vanderbilt University Press), and Animals at the End of the World by Gloria Susana Esquivel (University of Texas Press). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the Denver Quarterly, the Yale Review, the North American Review, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. She writes a monthly column on translation for Palette Poetry.

Read Robin Myers interviewed by Lauren Peat.