And Friends, Let Me Tell You About My Hat, Please Leave The Lights On & Your Own Personal Trainer, & And Friends, Let Me Tell You About My Hat

Poems by Sasha Fletcher

And Friends, Let Me Tell You About My Hat

federal savings and loan walked outside to a very open space
and began, very slowly,
to build something,
on the sort of day when the rains come hard
for one solid unrelenting minute
and are forgotten like motel bibles.
as he hammered, he thought about the act of slowly borrowing
everything in his next door neighbor’s bedroom
item by item
and keeping them in a far smaller duplicate room
that he was making
for exactly that purpose.

she, the neighbor, stopped to ask him, federal, what he was building,
which was obviously not a part of the plan,
and so, visibly shaken, he said to her
“friend, let me tell you about my hat”
even though he was not wearing one,
and she asked to hear the story,
and federal savings and loan told her the story
but explained that in order to do so, he would need to borrow a pillow,
which, she felt, seemed like reasonable request.
she went to her room to get it,
while he attempted, very quickly,
to not get excited.
what the next door neighbor would do when everything was placed
in the far smaller room being built for just that purpose
had not been directly addressed yet.
if you had any thoughts on the matter it might be best
to keep them right where they are.

a house rested playfully
just beyond the trash can’s horizon
a vacuum cleaner was humming
the smell of sealant in the air
as she brought federal savings and loan a pitcher of lemonade
which, of course, he thanked her for.
she said to him “please tell me the story about your hat again.”

Please Leave the Lights On

i stayed down on the ground and let them all have my neck
and in the morning something had changed.

categorically, there is something about ghosts
that i cannot understand.

imagine death as a skeleton on a skeleton horse.
now picture that skeleton riding the skeleton of an automobile,
or some type of dirt bike.

i thought about that last night
and then i dreamed about a man with a peg leg
and a pea coat
standing on a pier and watching as the seas parted
in such a way that he could never cross them again.
and as a great big clipper ship carried something very important to him
very far away,
his eyes made me think of the way a lighthouse must look to a sailor
intent on synchronized shipwrecks
or, that is how things seemed
as he climbed into the dinghy.


Your Own Personal Trainer

today at work murph seemed to be struggling with something
that was very heavy.
at the end of the night
once the grills had been turned off
and the steamers cleaned with vinegar and water
i said "murph," i said, "what is it?"
he opened his chef's coat and i saw
he was wearing a weighted vest.
"murph," i said, “are you training for something?"
he said yes and so i asked him what he was training for.
after a beat or two, he said "guilt."
then a little later he said "no,
that's not what I meant."

[Sasha Fletcher is an artist and writer living and working in Philadelphia. He also runs a blog.]


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