You Think People Don’t Like You But They Do
It was dark enough in the stairwell for what we were doing—
what we said we wanted to do. Poor boy, poor the girl
I was, neither really wanted to—
But the drinking in the room was boring, we were hard-thinking
bodies, and swimming was out of the question.
The pool closed at 9 at the state school,
so in the dim stairwell of a dorm, we fucked, sorry right away
that we had ignored each other when we came. Being young
has an engine of its own. The man in my bed tonight has put away
his book, and asks that the light be dimmed, and how could he have known
what’s in my heart, now or then? The thing with you, they both could have said,
and both be right, is you think people don’t like you but they do.
My current kismet is pretty good.
If I count my friends, the number gets slippery
with the names of lovers who’ve been kind.
One moment we’d be slutting around the couch, then
one of us might say, I like your book, and the greedy
heart settles down. That’s how it goes, now.
Daniela Buccilli is a poet and a public high school teacher. Some of her poems can be found at Paterson Literary Review, Cimarron Review, Cider Press Review, Italian Americana, US 1 Worksheets, and Free State Review. She holds an MFA in fiction (University of Pittsburgh) and is currently a candidate for one in poetry (Carlow University). She is editing the upcoming anthology Show Us Your Papers and reads for the literary magazine Pittsburgh Poetry Journal. Her work has been anthologized in The Two Dreamers: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Anne Frank (Beautiful Cadaver, 2019). Her chapbook is What it Takes to Carry (Main Street Rag, 2019).