SOMEONE PLAYS MARY J. BLIGE'S "REAL LOVE" ON REPEAT 14 TIMES by Andrew K. Peterson

Someone Plays Mary J. Blige'S "Real Love" On Repeat 14 Times

by Andrew K. Peterson

hush · issue 3

SOMEONE PLAYS MARY J. BLIGE'S "REAL LOVE" ON REPEAT 14 TIMES

For Brandon Brown

Waiting for the light to change, a car goes too far and backs out the intersection. Change the

station Autumn Sweater’s on prepping to talk with a friend in

pain. Read “even through the pain you experience, you might try to imagine the ache connects you with all suffering beings,

alive in all the realms, connecting.” In Detroit, crack dealers diversify to include Oxycontin.

Biology, economics.

By the gas station, a landscaper in a Nautica tee is tossing roots in a barrel. Signs on the lawns

around town say, VOTE NO. I don’t want to; I won’t. It must be spring, to hear the peepers

muck the dark on Oak. Someone sings, “Hold tenderly to what remains.”

 

What’s this pill in my pocket? Take it, and await enlightenment.

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.