Going Out Tonight
after “Conversation” by Charles Ladson, 2018
Mannequin gray, bare skin,
even the sun could not witness
the two of us, strange
in the most common ways.
Are you looking around
for the other black sock?
Maybe you’ll find it
where the other boot hides;
besides, purple doesn’t go with
what you’re wearing.
I’ll be gone soon, remember;
feed the dog while I’m away.
I don’t want you getting lonely.
Make sure to let
the light in; make it guess
at what you have
planned for the day.
And please, don’t forget
to water the plants
in the windowsill, the ones
that remind me of the times
we looked forward to
who we would be
when we die.
Michael Beard is a first-year MFA student in Poetry at Bowling Green State University. In undergrad, he served as the poetry editor for Sequoya Review. His poems have appeared in Glass Mountain Review, Oakland Arts Review, the 2021 Southern Literary Festival Anthology, and elsewhere.
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