Poetry: “You can’t ask a friend” by Taneum Bambrick

You can’t ask a friend

if the love of your life was the love of your life
or just the way it felt to sit in a long studio
watching one cartoon lemon
devour parts of another cartoon lemon
until one got small and the other got big.
You can’t ask a friend if, after four years, your voice  
sounds painted into your throat.
If it’s normal to wait for someone you know
to become someone you don’t.
You can’t neglect a squirrel’s body  
choked in a culvert while also 
texting your friend, for the third time in one day,
that you believe in therapy. 
When you ask your friend how long the berries 
inside your gut will turn, you ask them
to remember. To help you, your friend
should never have to hurt.
Together, you can go for dinner somewhere blinking
in the oak trees. Approve all recent nudes. 
Skulls over their nipples.
A boat between your knees.
Order each other bottles of whiskey.
The same print of two raccoons drinking
at a table covered in scraps.
Clenching white mugs, those slender ghost hands
remind you of your ex-fiancé’s
setting coffee on the crate beside where you slept.
Him setting coffee beside you
is something you can clench.
Like the fossil you knocked off a boulder in Dallas.
Blue thread stitching your left
shirt sleeve. How you called each other this and it.
Like you are it. Or this is it for me. 

About Taneum Bambrick

Taneum Bambrick (she/they) is the author of Intimacies, Received (Copper Canyon Press, Sept 2022) and VANTAGE (American Poetry Review 2019). A 2020 Stegner Fellow, she is currently a Dornsife Fellow at The University of Southern California.