Blue Mountain Arts Poetry Contest

Things I Wish I Could Tell You
by Enchi

THirty-eighth
Contest
SECOND Place

I settle into my place on the roof
and watch
as the sun settles behind the crumbling buildings of Baltimore.
The sky maintains only a breath of color —
a kiss of purple that snuggles so tightly against a fingerprint of gold
that they melt
to transparency
together,
succumbing to hushed hues of midnight goodnights
and airport goodbyes.

There are things I wish I could tell you.
Things like,
Baltimore is beautiful.
It’s like
the lights here
never
turn off. Or that
I learned how to use the bus,
and it isn’t nearly as difficult as I thought it would be.
That I know where to find the best ice cream,
and one day,
I’ll show you.

I wish I could tell you,
that when I was first beginning art school, my professor warned me,
“You may find yourself living
a very lonely
sort of life.”
And that he was wrong.

He told me, “But such is the life
of the starving artist.
Like a shark,
you must always stay moving.
Or you will surely die.”
And he was right.

I wish I could tell you,
that sometimes I worry that
Baltimore isn’t worth it.
That I should board a plane back to you,
back to the warmth of your smile
back to your flowery perfume
back to the faucet
that drips
throughout the night.

But I want you to know,
that I think we must have both —
that I don’t want a love that is convenient.
One that I can find like an upturned penny on
a sidewalk
in the city.

I wish I could tell you
that I prefer sunsets to fish.
A half-empty bed to an affection my heart cannot recognize.

You are my sunset.
And in spite of miles of bird, and cloud, and sky,
I can feel your warmth as strongly as ever.

About the Author

Enchi is a current student at Johns Hopkins University studying Writing Seminars and Computer Science. She enjoys all things horror, dystopian, queer, Hispanic, and female, and her writing has been published online by Blue Mountain Arts. You can find her on Twitter at @enchienchilada.