Our neighbors loved us.

If by love you mean recited
each annoying thing we did

with fondness

back to us without the tsktsk
that would actually have made it fond. 

I still remember
the way you turned to me

as you peed in your sock drawer

after a night with
that history professor on anti-psychotics.

Foofy-cocktail blue bathing
mountain peak after mountain peak

to the increasingly pastel horizon.

A pure color you can taste:
like oceans in the bible.

The plush
of a plot

with no actual adults in it.

*

John Emil Vincent lives in Montreal. His first book, Excitement Tax, was a finalist for the Quebec Writers Federation First Book Prize and the ReLit Prize. His fourth book of poems, The Decline and Fall of the Chatty Empire, an epyllion following the adventures of Chatty Cathy and her band of has-been dolls, is just out with McGill-Queen’s University Press.