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Evan Stephens Jul 2019
Cut and curled,
our brandy faces'
blood-pulled art
lifts and drops
with water moves.

A hundred world
of summer place's
galloped heart,
some teething lops
& dayside loves.
Evan Stephens Jan 2021
I watch the small birds
chop across caroled glen,
bunch split on branch,
push through bitter yard.

In this way I have missed you,
stirring myself thing to thing
in the same small spaces -
finding only thinness to rest on.
Evan Stephens Nov 2019
I'm alone in my room.
There is a green-skinned lamp
casting a level wave
onto an orange cat.

Bourbon, on the rocks,
waits in a shallow brown shadow.
The open window
is a breezy mumble.  

Peerless girl,
come inhabit all the sweet spaces
of my slowest imagining
with your light and wild step.
Evan Stephens Mar 2021
The moon wears a dull brown gown,
& the stars seem braced up there,
a few tired Christmas bulbs
pinned to a threadbare pine.

Dublin is just as far tonight
as it ever was,
& again I'll sleep alone
in an alien city

where fleets of black-bellied cars
crawl among the funerals,
over the fur of the earth
roughed and matted with rain.

In this last push before sleep
I'll choose instead to remember
your susurrating hair,
fanned across the pillow.
Io
Evan Stephens Aug 2022
Io
New-make maiden, soft as flake,
staring at a flower cake field
as brass-headed bells are bawling:
a cloud’s detonating head rings you.

I have also been reshaped by promises,
& felt the dead-dream weight
across the shoulders. It stings me,
seeing you yearn for the old skin.

A river is ****** inside us,
& grows wider and wider;
the shop registers are singing
after the sun-brunch.

A river is rising within us,
& grows deeper and deeper.
Come, take the tennis court oath with me -
let us revolt in the afternoon.
Finished from the stub of a poem written in 1997
Evan Stephens Aug 2019
I refused you, heart.
I saw the end parenthesis.

I escaped
the ten year wall.

There was an empty,
starry sting.

I pulled my thoughts in,
raised the sail into the wave.

From every corner
I heard C minor.

O heart, I refused you
& look at me now -

stone-mute, castle-hearted,
dying of it.
~2008
Evan Stephens May 2019
You're in hell,
a fractioned
ghost, eating
clay and dust.
You suppose
time moves
in this abyss
but there's no
way to be sure.

Then:
a scream
at the gates
like all the
winds that
scrape at
the heart.
& it doesn't
take long
before the screams
resolve to a name:
Ishtar is here.

She of ***, war,
& the moon, all
of them long
absent in
this place.
She wants in,
to rule this
forsaken empire,
to take it from
her older sister,
to conquer
one more thing.

She fails,
of course.
Her sister
tricks her,
leaves her
naked,
without her
powers,
after the
final gate.
Ishtar howls,
and leaves
to eat men
like easy grain.

But imagine
that brief
moment,
when you
think that
maybe, just
maybe, you'd
see the organza
ball of moon
again, that
you and the one
next to you
might embrace
in shaded lust,
engender
a new empire
in the dark,
& overthrow it all.

Hold on to
your hope:
Ishtar has
never been
patient.
Evan Stephens Feb 2021
I still see you
laying in the balled dark,
moon-pretty,
pinkish ache,
webbed in lash.
I still hear you
& fall in swoon
when you tell me
in Turkish
that your little left hand
is still sleeping.
O darling...
I stand in the doorway
& let my heart *****
to your ghost.
You're here and not here.
How can I sleep like this,
on a bed so pricking with memory?
In this slush of shadow,
this leavened night breath,
your absence feels almost like love.
Evan Stephens Jun 2022
“Spirit
is Life
It flows thru
the death of me
endlessly
like a river
unafraid
of becoming
the sea”
-Gregory Corso


A hundred thousand red laps
from one midnight to the next:

the valve clutches and clasps
at wet clapping truths

but they slip away like silk scraps
in the black gap breeze.

The heart is no throne, but wrapped
gnarl - the abandoned winter's nest,

denuded strakes of burlap strap
curved and curled into the branch fork,

disguising the lacuna and the lapse.
Does the river gladly pass into the sea?

Or does the sea sip it down, easy as a nightcap
with chill willow and spruce,

another blue vein-line snuffed on a map,
another salt stone silting an unseen reef?
In the shadow of the Cairo
(yellow-bodied, stony-crowned,

its high and untroubled brow
gazing over our fleeting forms

as we scamper to small habits)
I think of you O love, though

(rain heads are drifting east
in humid fists of fat vapor,

air hangs in cloying squares)
the city is all alcoholic laughter.

Or maybe that's me projecting
(I grew up in a green country

with cornstalk and cow, my room
brimmed with book and song;

after that first divorce I collapsed
down into a city that teemed

with such friendly drink, helped me
forget a clever father who left me,

a lock-in mother who didn't care,
forget sweethearts waltzing away,

friends turning and fading, fires
I ate as they ate me in turn).

Now it's a hundred and change
in the Cairo's shade and I think

of you, sweet one. This yellow king
sweeps a wide view over the bake

of the block as I wander down
to finish your teal. (O, I'm alone,

always alone, but with you
I'm a little less aware of it).

Stay with me and touch me -
remind me why I'm still alive.
Completed in 1894, in the Egyptian style popular at the time, The Cairo is Washington DC's tallest residential building.
Evan Stephens Apr 2020
It is a night
of champagne and ashes.

Here is a glass
that never stops weeping,

singing your name
with a wheeling hunger.

I sit just nearby,
under yesterday's chandelier,

reaching your sleep
with all ten fingers.

Tonight I'm rioting
with your smile,

and my skin
is insane from wishing.

Tomorrow I will be satisfied
with your wanton eye,

and the clever flood
of your lip.
Evan Stephens Apr 2019
Bittersweet,
this leaving.
It may have
turned a little,
but it was always
underneath you,
a comfort.

Still, your
blissed heart
is filled with
butterfly wings,
& the book-edge
horizon beckons
with sunrises:

You'll go east,
to friends who
can intuit the
new green spaces
growing inside you.
Tell them
       everything.


I will be waiting,
the face that
adores you,
like a prince
trapped in
a mirror,
restless to come
& enter the
world of hands
and lips -
& whispers that
ignore the ear
& dive straight
to the castle
of the soul.
Evan Stephens Aug 2019
It's tempting
to restart history
with this nocturne
I play for you.

Let all the books be
an empire of cinder
swept away by an
indifferent breeze,
long diaries of ash
caught in the pines.

Your words, your kiss
will be the first on record.
We will write new volumes
in a ****** world.

But first let me finish
this nocturne I play
for you late, late
in the night.
Evan Stephens Dec 2020
They buried an elephant
here, in 1922:

White and brown
wet and scattered
branches.
Evan Stephens Mar 2019
I was fifteen
in a birthday
room for Alan.
Lamps out,
air thick
with the flick
& sag of
a movie.
My slick hand
taken by the girl
on the floor.
White noise burst
in my mouth.
My heart
crawled
down the stairs.
The lamps
puffed on
and she slipped
my hand.
Each cone and
rod in her
green eyes
glistened,
adolescent.

I saw her again
at a house party
when I was
twenty-three.
Drunk on
Haitian ***,
carving out
a blood rhythm
under
a canopy
of memory.
Her lips shined
in memorial
to what teenagers
had been, once.

Later, I threw up
the *** into
the bushes
below the kitchen
window and I heard
her turn
off the faucet with
an indifferent laugh.
Evan Stephens Jul 2019
I was going through
this box I've had
since my father died
it's full of the things
he saved about me
my third grade report
card calling me social
but not much of a rule
follower or my dorm
room clean-out card
all those things but
what tore me up
were all these short
stories I wrote when
I was 17 or 18 and had
these dreams of being
the next Joyce I barely
even remember some
of them but what I do
remember is that dad
always wanted to write
a story together father
and son and kept giving
me ideas to start my half
of it and I never did
I never wrote a ******
word I might have sent
him an idea and then
never followed up and
now he's gone and what
I wouldn't give to just
write a few **** words
for him to show him
I took it seriously and
maybe give him just
that one more chance to
open up and tell me what
kinds of things rested
in the broadness of his mind.
Evan Stephens Dec 2020
I was thinking of you,
watching green oxide stone
resist the rain
on a broken Sunday
when the groins of trees
trembled in the breeze,
& the sky lacked
all confidence,
five days until
the metal snout
carried me off,
away from a dawn yard
of bread brick, and
towards the one-wing bridge
& your greenest wave.
Evan Stephens Mar 2019
I will write about it,
someday. Today,
though, my life
huddles under
a blue raincoat.
Someday I will
tell it all, really.
See, the problem
is that I have
given away
all my secrets,
but not to you.
Evan Stephens Jul 2019
Were they always a metaphor
for depression?

The green women
living always in the
ice-sluggish river,
waiting with thorn
teeth for those who
don't know better than
to approach their world?

Postpartum mothers who
pull the children back
into the quiet womb?

Every river seems
to have one:
Jenny Greenteeth,
Peg Powler,
Nelly Longarms.

Step out of the water, Jenny -
shake off the cold, cut your
hair, your nails. Toast some
cheese and bread, drink cider.
I won't ask you to smile,
or promise to save you,
but maybe just sitting
on the bench is enough
to keep your feet dry.
Evan Stephens Feb 2022
"Je vis assis, tel qu'un ange  aux mains d'un barbier" -Rimbaud
"I spend my life sitting, like an angel in the hands of a barber"


Here it is, another day.
This one is called Monday.

The sour yellow-white wax
smears bright as feathery snow

towards the westing.
"I spend my life sitting,

like an angel in the hands of a barber."
Clouds are old sailcloth,

gray hunches traded away
at voyage's end in exchange

for a handful of sallow moon.
I am missing a lot of necessary things.

I fill the gaps as I can, but, well...
I let my beard grow out, so that I look

as unwholesome as I feel.
Small birds chirp on branches

bare as flayed phalanges.
If love is man unfinished,

then so is death.
Brown hierarchies ride along

in the early holiday afternoon,
while brick squats off the road.

Here it is, another day.
This one is called Monday.
Evan Stephens Jan 2021
The following is an account of
expenses in connection
with the Underwood investigation.

Expense account item #1:
$24, cab fare to your office.
Case of Jane Underwood,

Seattle, not seen
the last eight days.
Insurance policy on

her: $10 million.
I took the case.
I cocked my hat

low over my eyes,
cigarette behind the ear.
Expense account item #2:

$322.74, airfare to Seattle.
I interviewed the family,
the friends, the husband -

they all had alibis -
& also the man
she was seeing on the sly.

Expense account item #3:
$33.08, two packs of cigarettes,
a pack of gum, and a beer

at the neighborhood bar
where I watched Jake Wilson -
the Other Man in the picture.

Expense account item #4:
$29.90, cab fare from the hospital
where Wilson just gave it up.

I found him folded under
a neon sign by a cheap hotel.
I didn't see where the shots came from.

Someone wants Underwood
the stay missing, very missing.
Expense account item #5:

$120, a new coat, the old one
has bullet holes. More close calls.
Digging around, I learn

Wilson was knee deep
in counterfeiting Franklins.
Crowbar to the basement door

of the house he was renting
under a different name,
I found the missing woman,

cuffed to a radiator, mostly fine.
She found out about the funny money,
threatened to go to the cops

unless Wilson cut her in.
She was over her head.
But then - so was I -

who shot Wilson?
Expense account item #6:
$75, marriage license, King County.

Jane Underwood and I are
running away together
with the bad hundreds.

Time to end one of these
stories the easy way.
Tired of Hartford,

tired of heart's noir,
consider me retired.
But then, holding her hand

driving to Los Angeles,
her purse falls open
& the gun that killed Wilson

falls into the footwell.
It was all a setup. It always is.
Her hand gets cold, tight,

real tight. The ride
is about to get... difficult.
If only she knew, if only she knew

how many times I'd seen this
twist, how many women,
how many guns, how many

Wilsons had fallen to the ground
under how many cheap
blinking blue broken neon signs.
a love letter to the old radio show "Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar," about an insurance investigator who always gets caught up in the noir world of betrayal, ******, femme fatales. He keeps a running tally of his expenses as he goes.
Evan Stephens Mar 2019
We talk
late into
the street,
the trees
seem to
come loose
and drift
out into
the night sky.

In the farthest
distance,
galaxies
break apart
into strings
of stars.

You're in
Dublin,
lovely
in your step,
in your voice,
in the stocking
you rip
so idly.

I watch
people
stroll across
the broad
walk of
apricot
stones.

I watch
the dark
green sky
drop centuries
down the
Spanish steps.

I listen
as you
enchant
my phone
with sighs.

The world
is so small,
crossing
the bedposts
of the sun.

The world
is so large,
on the beach
of your
laughter.
Evan Stephens May 2020
Brown bottle's weeping
in the summer evening -
following the lawns to  
Kansas Avenue,

the night limps in
on starry crutch
over a heady glaze of traffic
riding the asphalt beam.

A woman walks a parrot
in the circle, and children
skip to avoid stepping
on cracks.
  
Thready breeze, brick slants
follow me back
to the thin javelin
of Gallatin Street.
Evan Stephens Apr 2019
My skin's
fever,
your gaze's
brook -

Join me,
even if
to reach me
you must use
the milky way
for stepping
stones.

Each mile is
conspiracy
against us.

Each hour
of division,
is poison that
I am forced
to drink
with you.

You, with
Rapunzel's
tresses,
you are in
poems that
have always
existed.

No matter
how much
I want you
to lay there
and let me
read to you
by the light
of comets,
you can't
hear me.

You are
too far -

My skin's
sun,
your gaze's
moon.
Evan Stephens Dec 2022
We were just telephones
full of young ***,
sharp breath and sticky,
talking into sleep...

I'd dial into your machine,
it was your mom singing
"Splish Splash" by Bobby Darin,
you were so embarrassed

(with that button nose
you hated so much),
but it was always OK, Kelly.
We met just the once, at Alan's party,

for his basement Exorcist
& you clutched my hand in the dark.
When you're 15, that kind of thing
takes on certain meanings.

When you broke us up
I sobbed in my bedroom,
pleading to Richard Pryor
who I had pasted to the ceiling.

I lost track of you
until you married my blond
summer steakhouse boss:
everyone said you weren't happy.

Now you are a minus sign,
a gauze-ghost, an atom-gap,
a redheaded dull-bladed heartache
who I thought I loved, once

(in my teenage way, I did).
I buttoned my shirt wrong
while remembering you,
I tasted you in a glass of rye.

There is a freeze coming.
Wear a scarf, a good jacket:
the rain is coffin lacquer gloss
as it shines and skitters into ice.
Evan Stephens Jun 2019
In the attic
with sister
old computer.

Insert disc 1 of 9,
King's Quest IV:
The Perils of Rosella,

argue about
who types,
where next,

do we call
the hintline,
5 a minute.

Rosella walks
screen to screen
in red dress.

We direct her
to act and
to die.

Reload
Rosella,
start again.

It took
all winter
to complete.

I remember
everything,
the whale and

the bridle,
the ball and
the hen.

In memory's
treasury
this is among

the most dear:
walnut table,
voltage hum,

sister yelling
watch out
watch out.
Evan Stephens Feb 2021
Your old card,
"You're My Person"
creases in my hand.

The note is so sweet
it ruins me; my nose
spots blood, I cry so hard.

Even if I put it down
& only touch it
with my mind

it wrecks the afternoon,
a hammer-handle
between the eyes.  

Yet I can't even file it away,
still less remove the pastel
from the black chess mantel.

It's part of me,
stowed deep in the heart,
like a blade the doctors
are afraid to remove.

I also sent cards,
filled with adoring scrawl,
Turkish slices,
raw pianissimos of love.  

I wonder if they split you, too.
I don't know what we are,
only how I feel -

you are the root
of gladness.
My hair still burns

when I think of you.
I am committed to the dark
chancels of your thoughts.

I may be shackled to the white blot
of Washington, but the blood
specking whorl and loop
erupts from Dublin.

Consider this, then,
another card,
sent to you across
cerulean cavity

all the way to your
necklace of river.  
You're my person.

As always, my honey,
I close with
kisses and hugs,

knots and crosses:
"xoxoxo"
Evan Stephens Oct 2019
My glass
is all ice and
cheap *****.

My eye drowns
with envy in
your clean kõlsch.

Neither of us
speak a word
about marriage.
Evan Stephens Oct 2019
The sad old dracula
totters down Lamont,
smells like brandy.

White hair puffed
with talcum or flour,
last year's grease
paint blood running
mouth to chin, collar
turned out high,
swaying on heavy
feet among the happy
terror of children.

He sits on the curb,
falls asleep.

Who knows what
escape he sells
to himself, what
weight this dissolves?

A toddler leaves a fistful
of candy at his feet,
for him to enjoy when
the sun is thrown out
onto the street.
Evan Stephens Feb 2021
Drinking four hours now
in a pool hall, Larkin folded
behind me as a I draw
back the cue. Distressed,
lines snap the stroke:
The rapid clouds, the moon’s cleanliness.
Not tonight: clouds crawl
on sick bellies to an Alka-Seltzer moon.

But drink gone dead, without showing how
to meet tomorrow
– is molded
perfectly to this blind drunk, thawing
beneath breezy transom, getting dressed
for a ride home after going for broke,
drinking anesthesia and losing all finesse
early in the binge, kindly corralled
by patient friends deaf to last call's croon.
Revision of a poem from 2003
Evan Stephens Mar 2021
Larkspur rose with azure head
in that blondish vacancy
by the metro line:
you were a summer.

But now those withered faces
are mute, closed for business,
peacock's burst plumes:
you are a winter.
Evan Stephens Mar 31
He thought at us in hissing chops,
our phones open lone black lids

& bloom our rooms with oddities,
raving cardiac tumbles into blank scrawl

that came from no place we knew,
sloughed from an under-yeared heart.

The pain pressed out from the glass,
topographical agonies in the dark,

a rake's frenzies of bleak humor
aimed at no one in particular

until it drained to a feverish bankruptcy -
he asked how M. G. died, if we thought

that's what would happen to him.
Who knows what the others thought -

I felt his mind bedded down in self,
a corner stall of gravel and nails,

tried to distract with jokes of my own,
don't know if it worked or not.

The phone in hush, the hour now
delinquent, adrift, exhausted.

In the hills, the cities: he braced us
each to the next, acid-pitted night minds.
Evan Stephens Dec 2020
Lay a shadow on me -
we sleep overlapped
with the night-bells,
the thieves in the pines,
the crescent wine,
mothers-of-pearl.

Lay a shadow on me -
your sun's waist
rises while my dreams
are still marching
across my forehead.
Evan Stephens Apr 2021
It's another late night
when rain strokes the yard

into gore-blue slate strakes.
Beyond the almond-thin window

a car hurtles into a red away
at the same time

as your face pushes
through the plum-colored

angelfish orchids
right to my blanket eye

as I wake from a dream
about snow in Dublin.

A moon bathes in Judas rain,
in dense yellow shadow;

although I am so alone -
I have never been so alone -

I feel your presence
in this strange convergence

of a flower's face, and
the memory of motherless snow.
Evan Stephens May 2019
Long morning
chopped with sleep
drifts into a long
afternoon, also
chopped with sleep.
Evening brings
similar promises.

Some Sundays
take you in the
teeth and never
let you go.

A day for a lonely
cigarette in the yard,
for looking into the
mirror and reassessing,
for watching the trees
waving each to each.

Not much else now
but to take the little
pills and wait
for tomorrow.
Evan Stephens Apr 2019
Rare girl,
so full of life,
watch how
three cartwheels
of years pursue
you, for you
are born from
the shavings of
the sun's golden
flanks, from
crystal splinters
of full moon,
from dreaming
flakes of rain -
little pieces of
every day that
went missing
over three years,
sliding away
to assemble you,
on that
perfect day.

Those three years
will always lie
to you, tell you
your birthday is gone
when they have
bundled it away.

But they know
that every
fourth year
you will
come for it,
& you will
open the day
like a package,
& with a spoon
you will eat the
honeycomb of sun
that is your birthright,
the sweet milk of moon,
on dishes of rain.

You are so open
to the world
because you are
so much of it.
Evan Stephens Apr 2019
All things
are equal
in length
& distance
from you -
the shyness
of tea steeping,
breezes
drawn off
Maryland's
green-armed
mountain,
night's gin
spill of
light on
the pane -
& don't forget
that I too
am in your
sphere,
more than
shadow,
less than
touch.
“The way to
heaven out of
all places is of
like length
and distance.”
-Thomas More, Utopia
Evan Stephens May 2019
Let me warn you,
this poem says
                           nothing.

A half-inch of snow
fell in the yard?
I'm compelled
to record it here
for reasons unknown
even to myself.

The clouds are dark
and frothing?
That's nothing new.

What do rough
cumulus lips
mouth in the
upper distance?
Look up, peer
as snow-hills
melt into self-loathing.

By the way,
this poem merely
turned skyward,
it still says
                   nothing.
Written in 2004
Evan Stephens Feb 2021
Please, please, please
come down on our side.
I'll ditch this clovering snow,
& go anywhere with you.
Either way, our parade
will keep moving
down Main St.
I'm dying to tell you this,
but you're so far from me,
slipped into the black squares
of distance you requested.
I packed your things because
I couldn't take the museum:
your cherry lover's dress,
your little coffee mugs,
your Aleppo pepper.
Then I unpacked the pepper.
I love you without condition,
little tiramisu.
But I can't make you feel
the same way
without your help.  
Please come down
on our side, honey.
In our ship, right now
you are the captain
with the wheel in your hand.
I am the lookout -
I think I see land,
but there might be rocks.
Evan Stephens Aug 2019
Dear E--,

Sewing gold,
we walked
in the vacant
invisibilities.

In a hush-throated hall
we saw a Last Supper
of acrylic blocks,
breaks of the past.

Wooden masks
deviled the olive wall,
& we found tiles that
turned out our hands.

None of this sustained
you when the sun dropped
beams like pick-up-sticks,
aces of heat.

It didn't sustain you
when my friends
split like copper stills
across the breaded table.

The grand oil lamp
& the sea chant
became ash daubs
of noose memory

when I returned
to your dark room.
I'm sorry for every
thing I couldn't repair.

Every whorl
& loop in my hands
held you tight
as boas.

By the time I felt
your breath settle
into the delta of sleep
things had half-healed.

Still, I trembled
with sharp dreams.
In the morning,
I was yours again -

as I always was.
This is my apology.
Yours,
Evan
Evan Stephens Jan 2021
To E--,

Sleep flocks east,
leaving sheets clapped,
& yanking back
my unruly dream.
Frost is handsome
in the starry clover,
& an unsteady sun
seems still drunk,
flushed about the cheek,
after columns of Saturday.
I can feel the chill
across the glass
when holly stripes
with stringent wind -
I miss you.
You trouble my mornings
with your absence.
Sometimes when thoughts
are mottled by drowse,
I surprise myself
making coffee for two.
My walls rhyme
with your drawings.
I must wait until
your half of the bed
aligns heady bells again
on a snow-drum Sunday.
I remain,
your lamp-eyed lover,
Yours,
Evan
Evan Stephens Apr 2019
Dearest E--,

"For she had eyes
and chose me"

I send
you a
small
lyric.

You
have
always
deserved
it.

“But I will wear
my heart upon my sleeve”

I take
this
play
& fit it
to my
need
this
Sunday,

my heart
a cuff,
shaking
with
morning,
affixed
with
a storm.

“I would not put a thief
in my mouth
to steal my brains.”

Your
voice
plays
among
my teeth,
& soon
my
thoughts
are your
rings,
Lorca's
green.

“Men should be
what they seem.”

"Our bodies are our gardens
to the which our wills are gardeners.”

My past,
with all
of its
attempts,
is as
naked
to you
as this
vein
that flees
my wrist.

In the
glass
you can
see me
whenever
you
choose,
even
though
my hair
waves
the
wrong
way
& my
olive
skin
dawns
with
ardor.

"To you I am bound
for life and education"

You
have the
scratch-map
to adventure -
you
journeyed
deep -
whereas
I spent
a life
burning,
'a trail
for the
devil to
erase.'

You are
a beam
let into
the rooms
of night.

I am
bound
like a
sailor
to the
mast.  

"Each second
stood heir
to the first"

Time
sips
from
each
glass,
moving
down
the line.

I miss
you,

Ever Yours,
Evan
Evan Stephens Nov 2024
Dear A------,

I remember you at my sister's wedding,
you had hands of wild river,

& clouded beach was in your hair -
I was halfway through a sober year

sitting in a rattan bastille chair
watching the sea fashions,

my ear full of jailbreak children -
but I was thinking of night shapes,

things transformed by the dark -
I thought of your recipe: lost keys,

waning crescents, streetlamp breezes -
how strange and free I felt right then,

evening's cousin dressed to the nines
under trees bent to ferocious shade.

Then years passed: another marriage
disappeared into ribcage landslides

& mind riots, jobs were just smoke,
then it was Halloween and I was 44

& I was in New Orleans.
I wondered if you claimed it

the way I once claimed DC -
ambushed by a lost heart

that crept up into me in the suburbs
until only the city crux felt safe,

surrounded by new people
who might be doctors or hangmen.

I missed you that Halloween night,
though I ate in the corner

of your restaurant before I was blinded
by the rain bustle and whisked back

into a hotel window. I missed you also
the next night on Frenchman Street,

& in Storyville and Tremé where I wandered
throughout the runny yolk mornings -

who's to know if you'd even recognize me,
they've been hard years since Ocean City;

until I see you next I'll leave this letter
like a sip of liquor kept in promise

of stories shared in a plank-barred dive
on Toulouse or Tchoupitoulas Street.

Yours, Evan
Evan Stephens Dec 2019
To E--,

The orange sky
at 9 pm
is thrown over
the streetlamps,
bursting the
starry seams.

It's like you're
here, sometimes,
on this couch
the color of
burnt grass,
looking back
past the gauze
into the
hinging face
of night.

In truth,
you're sleeping
at the crux
of two
continents,
in an
eight-hour wash.

Every night
violent dreams
find me out
& unsew me
a little bit.

But soon
my wing of sleep
will be clean again,
because you will
be returned to me.
The orange sky
at 9 pm will
stop revolting,
and the night
will again be
the sweetest
of burdens.

Always Yours,
E---
Dear E----,

The bus crawls eastward like an insect:
silvery carapace and compound eyes,

broad-spotted blue-red with ads
as we scuttle along the curb-crumbs,

outpacing a decaying Tuesday sun.
In my thoracic seat I think of love,

its strangest colors and contours,
gentle treacheries and bridges burnt,

a wavering lawn of doubled sleep.
Tonight we dine on margaritas

in our cheap pub on the hill,
hope the questions all get answered,

touch feet under the table in secret.
I'm sure I wear at your patience

with this haircut I slashed myself,
my many stumbles of attention,

all my errors of cipher and code,
& the old hot luggage of my battles...

but you persevere. Look up -
the stars are champagne perlage

in a dark coupe, and all around
the living are dying; the dying are living.
Evan Stephens Sep 2023
H----,
You leave for the broad south
in four days, to rasp a new curl

from old timber. Your destiny
is obliged to subdivide again,

fresh and wild. In the basement
of your goodbye I was filled

with a familiar senescence:
old wreaths, nerve-headed,

are hammered to inner doors
where I hide atomic thoughts

and hot-heart steam valves;
muffled click-clacks ricochet

in a containing pink sarcophagus.
How appropriate that I left

in the melting middle of the rain,
the road seething and spitting,

puddled rugs of mercury skating
across Saturday's lap.

H----, this life is strange and brief
& your escape to far sun country

is high adventure; but I lament
your absence, all the same.
Yours, Evan
Evan Stephens Apr 2019
Dear H-----,

Everything then
is now, too,

memory
is plural.

In law school
I mentored you

& let you ******
me after I broke

up with the art
deco girl who

kept turning the
blade in my side as

if it were a key.  
It was a scandal -

I felt my name
crawling lip to lip,

caught library looks,
but didn't care.

Your sister taught me
the moon game

at your kitchen table
& then spread my blood

with her song.
Do you remember it?

When I drank
my acetylene pain,

you were so quick
to forgive. It left

an impression.
We came home late,

laughing so hard
we were *******,  

with the moon
tangled in the ivy.

But I was still hanging
from the blade of

the art deco girl,
& it wasn't fair to you,

dying like that.
And then when

my grandmother
died, I needed you

but it was too much
& you fled. It was the end.

You moved, and married.
I let the art deco girl

saw me apart
a few more times.

But I never forgot
how alive we were,

or the strange sound
of the lullaby I wrote you.
from 2014
Evan Stephens Apr 2021
Dear J----,

How many suns died,
out in the black margins
& burning headrooms
since we last shared
any words of importance?
I look out tonight from the roof
towards the endless upper branch
& swear a few have blinked away.

You strolled in so casually
from my dream, as if from the wood
or park, and common strokes
moved in the air between us.
Your words fork across
all your grassy miles,
as you tell me about the fox-scream;
I can almost see the starlings
hash across miniature cubes of lawn.

I live in silver -
the cars that flicker right to left,
the metro's metallic hide,
the strange inflorescent cloud
that garottes the coinish moon.
I'll lend it you on afternoons
when the rain deposits itself
in quiet blue discs across the city.

Go now, and know
that I am always grateful
for another friend, especially
when they understand
how hard a heart heaves
across all the bent years.

Yours,
Evan
Evan Stephens Aug 2023
K----,

You are fresh milk
& I am lemon pulp.

My acid smile pools
on my face, pink curdled shadow

aimed at your corner.
You are so young:

you mock the silver sway
that drips down my cheeks.

You are draped in yourself,
but I don't really mind,

because you're clever. Inside you
I think there's something tender;

but it's not for me to uncover.
I'll sit in the angle,

the beer cranny, and glance
your way with eyes full of sugar.

The night dies waltzing
on yellow lemon heels;

the day is born in a flicker
of snide cream cloud.
Evan Stephens Jan 15
M. G.,

It was years ago in the A-frame,
beside a cold bachelor's lake

that was clogged with reflections
of raving burst-headed trees,

that we laughed as Jake threw up
the Genesee river in the midnight sink.

When you caught your breath
you told me how you had traveled,

how you'd found a woman and gone to her,
it was the most you'd ever shared with me.

But this letter cannot reach you, friend,
because Jake just told me that you died.

My head fills with the numberless times
I drove by your long-lawned house,

or knocked beers in a rampant yard
while fires fractured dull dark.

I consider that love is a terrible thing
when I see what it's done to my friends -

it didn't rise as sweet slow dough,
it wasn't a shyly signed valentine -

it was a Petri dish of troubled sleep
that bred malformed dreams;

it was a crocodile's jagged jaw-drag,
it was the dross of unwise prayers.

Well, hell: let this letter remind them all
of that barking laugh amid the stray pines

as Jake birthed a twilit river from his teeth.
Your Friend, Evan.
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