from River of Love
Kami Enzie

Borrowing your chunky knit fisherman’s sweater
(months, or even years ago, my heavens)
and returning it in bags of spools and laughing.
Two salmon yellow vases, then mailing back
unfired slabs, directions to a kiln. Frowning,
you couldn’t name what killed you; everything
given to me returned. The dinners in Hell’s Kitchen,
the chef coming out; sieved cocktails, garnished
oxtail, soused brains spread as sauce.
When spoons knock in dessert bowls it’s 1 a.m.,
the valet returns us keys to a Mercedes Benz,
or trying to, calls from under the awning
against the cross-town wind our names, after we
fell asleep in vacant subways. We never owned a car.

Kami Enzie, a Vienna-born, New Orleans–raised queer Nigerian-Filipino American writer, is a recent Iowa MFA grad and winner of the Tennessee Williams & New Orleans Literary Festival poetry contest. Work appears in  Chicago Review, Common Place, Oversound, The Poetry Review, and elsewhere.