MY FALSETTO LEOPARD PRINT IS A DREAM OF ALEC BALDWIN by Andrew K. Peterson

My Falsetto Leopard Print Is A Dream Of Alec Baldwin

by Andrew K. Peterson

hush · issue 3

MY FALSETTO LEOPARD PRINT IS A DREAM OF ALEC BALDWIN

For Joe Cooper

Driving home from visiting I imagine what terrible farmers we’d make if we were farmers 

We’d be terrible defending our farm from the roaming German hoard of radioactive wild boars

But we’d probably be good at letting wildflowers shape the fields while livestock grazes in sunshine

The road curves contracts and expands a butterfly tandem

files a spiral groove above 

I listen to Fleet Foxes

I listen to Pet Sounds

I remember looking up from our collaborations as you lurched towards the bathroom to puke, feeling bad like I should help, but what’s the point, though I see how it’s a gesture, vomiting’s a private (and automatic) thing

I listen to High Violet (think private thoughts)

I think “my falsetto leopard print is a dream of Alec Baldwin”

I remember hugging goodbye on your lawn this morning you were wearing your pink Hot Whiskey tee while your landlord watched us (I wasn’t embarrassed)  

I listen to Love’s Forever Changes and remember how we talk jokes until the words tip in place a little

If we were farmers, we could clear the range and wander while

grass grows on the bark of a fallen trunk 

Maybe we wouldn’t make such bad farmers really

Andrew K. Peterson

Andrew K. Peterson is an editor and author of five poetry books, most recently A Blue Nocturne Notebook (Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2021). A chapbook The Big Game Is Every Night was mailed to the White House in 2017 alongside other publications from Moria Books’ Locofo Chaps as collective protest. Another previous chap bonjour meriwether and the rabid maps (Fact-Simile, 2011) was included in an exhibition of poets’ maps at the University of Arizona’s Poetry Center. He is a co-founding editor of the online lit journal summer stock, and helped co-organize at his hometown Boston Poetry Marathon in 2017.