And he’d moved onto 43rd and Pine, so right on my sole walking route; only, once I linked with him, he’d lead me elsewhere.

Along routes I’d deemed beyond my range.

Un-triggering all the spots.

Re-instilling multiplicity to all the places I’d decided were, and could only be, a single thing.

I texted him What’s good around 5 one day.

He said he was going to an Eileen Myles reading at the Penn Book Center, a bookstore on 34th and Walnut, if I was tryna join.

“You’d just be going solo otherwise?”

“Yeah!” he said.

I’d been peripherally aware of this spot, but had never been inside, I realized, upon setting foot inside.

The reading was lit.

Poems that didn’t sound poem-y in the way I hated that most poems sounded.

More like rambly yet deliberate bars that loosely adhered to poetic form.

And Eileen Myles didn’t do the thing poets be doing at poetry readings where they make everyone uncomfortable at their self-seriousness, and by the end feel (the audience, or at least I, would) like the poet just jerked it, straddling them so they were trapped, and then busting prematurely onto their chest.

No; Eileen was charming, charismatic, self-aware.

Honestly hilarious.

Lubed everyone up with killer banter before plunging into the bars.

Which themselves didn’t sound all that different than the banter. Just more ordered.

It all sounded natural.

I was wetter than I’d ever been at a poetry reading.

So many young, attractive, femme women in there with their blatantly, almost parodically masculine-presenting female partners.

Like the divide was so distinct.

Hi-top fades, fuccboi haircuts, blazers, vests.

Cowboy belts.

A lotta Carhartt.

And I mean, I was wittit.

Eileen Myles, even, had just changed their pronoun from she to they, they mentioned.

And I fucked with—roundabout-related to—how wild/tricky some of their bars. From Evolution (2018):

I shoot these themes

themes

I mean my

jism

that look on your face

is covered

with my thought

Lol.

I mean damn.

It was out front the bookstore, after the reading, that I recognized, across the way, the poet Gina Myers.

Sorta spazzed out and wanted to go up to her, but then didn’t.

Then N and I walked to Local 44 on 44th and Pine, for a drink, and who did I see, sitting at the bar, but the poet Gina Myers. Again.

Wanted to approach her again but then didn’t.

•

First I encountered the poet Gina Myers was a season after moving back to Philly, late-fall two falls ago.

My first season back in Philly the first season post-Trump.

Spent full nocturnal and focused solely on stimulant intake and banging out the first draft of my weed farm novel, stretching out the weed bands I’d saved.

Come spring though I could sit and write in solitude no longer.

I had to make moves.

To scheme.