“Midtown”
The poet mopped the floor with us. The poet opened up like a cornered sky and fell on us. The poet felled us. The lights flickered. No drinks were ordered. Nobody rose for the pisser. The poet, a warned-about force, put everything internal up for sale—for free, on the front porch of their voice—and we carried all that we could handle home. For days we walked slower for how the poet had made us feel about trees. We just had to touch every trunk, rub the leaves, smell our hands, and then compose dark, sloppy emails about how it all felt—emails we then sent to the poet, who never responded, but did post online that they were not in a good place, mentally, and then apologized for transgressions no one in the poet’s life remembered.
A picture of our sorry faces was taken for the paper, and the headline said: THE TOPS OF THESE PEOPLE’S HEADS HAVE BEEN TAKEN OFF BY A POET, and of course we read the article, shared it, clipped it out, pinned it up at work, and watched it watch us wither, all the while turning over the article’s pull-quote: “I think a poem is a dig site. I’m talking archeological. There’s some shit down there,” the poet said. “And I just want one other thing on the record. I’m sorry I couldn’t get through the book-signing without crying. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
We promised our loved ones—though later, of course, we failed—that we would never forget how the poet had trounced us. The night of the reading we’d eaten dinner early, or out, or alone as usual, just to be on time for our trouncing. After all, we had come to be trounced, and we had been, had been hurt good and well, had been dunked on, had, with poems, been mopped.
We didn’t know when to clap, and then—we didn’t know when to stop.
Our hands still sting from the applause.
Tyler Barton
Tyler Barton is a cofounder of FEAR NO LIT, home of the Submerging Writer Fellowship and Page Match. His chapbook of flash fiction, The Quiet Part Loud, was published in 2019 by Split Lip Press. He lives in Lancaster, PA, which some people call Amish Country.
Twitter: goftyler