NEWS

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There was no one left on earth. So you liked
to pretend, smacking doors at 5 AM
with rolled-up papers, the dark and the deer

all yours, until you felt his stare, your normal
shy and weird. Acid rain, airstrikes, nothing
in the headlines, ink staining your hands, explained

his beckoning. He had nine bucks you needed
to collect; a while back your soccer team
appeared alongside the weddings and wrecks.

So you liked to pretend, like you hadn’t stood
on his porch, seen the big steel bed that belonged
to his roommate—as even he called him—

missing as if never there. A world ended.
But weeping, he was still perfect, still secret
as the deer, and then those arms

pulled you in, your body out of its mind, filled
with the wrong ache, maybe both, like dreaming
you could drive because you’d sat beside someone

a thousand times. He was that close,
close as the moon, even now, like news,
the thought of him, the stillness, when it comes.