Brian Builta

Nostalgia Born of Your Undoing

A strange happiness
once lived here,
a padded chaos.

Over the fence, the dark woods
of Devil’s Backbone, where we wrecked bikes
and buried beer.

Plastic soldiers with exit wounds,
colossal Hot Wheels catastrophes,
corpses in the catalpa tree.

Heights penciled on a
painted-over doorframe,
growth stacked like wood.

Fortnights here
were hard to defend
even during the day.

Father said I love you
night after night, building a bridge

into dense jungle.

Love should be enough.
This nostalgia, these rumpled jackets
fill every closet in this collapsing shack.

Twenty-Five

for Sarah

I remember being young with you once,
our marriage pregnant with possibility

but not experience. Just hope.

Twenty-five years in, well, what can we say?
I used to write you sonnets. Remember?
I’ve had the poetry pounded out

of me, but I’ve still got words, these
words, to say you mean the world to me,
the sun, the moon, the whole shebang,

no one I’d rather celebrate and suffer
than you, my grief buddy, my rock, the hand
that slaps me when I need it and sorry

for slapping back, for throwing things,
for this raging river inside me that floods
our village from time to time.

We’ve done young, now we age, soon we’ll be
simply fucking old, but truth be told, no
one else I’d rather eat, drink, or marry.