even now, i can still conjure the feeling 
      the slap-silly grin i wore in place of your name
 how the minutes ballooned before us, 
freckled with fraught exchanges 
i once dismissed as jitters
now, i am fluent in the language of placement 
      i mewl at the cruelty 
of kissing those tender-most junctures— 
the ones implying permanence 
a nape, a crook, the in-between of anywhere 
i sift the details for a story i can bear 
       a choice, a chasm, a change in the wind 
i pretend my name was ever different 
that there were lawyers, letters, 
arrangements to be made, 
debts to be settled 
        like anything was ever truly ours
      like you would fight for this
           like you didn’t say i could keep it all 
—everything but the smile

Published February 9, 2025

Kelsey L. Smoot (They/Them/He/Him) is a full-time PhD student in the interdisciplinary social sciences and humanities. They are also a poet, advocate, and frequent writer of critical analysis. Kelsey is the winner of the 2021 Sad Girls Club Spring Literary Contest, the 2023 The Good Life Review Honeybee Prize, and the Grand Prize Winner of the 2024 Button Poetry Video Contest. He is both Pushcart Prize nominee, as well as a Best of the Net nominee. Proudly, Kelsey the author of a chapbook titled we was bois together with CLASH! (An Imprint of Mouthfeel Press) and another chapbook, Muse, with Another New Calligraphy.

Ilana Savdie (born 1986) is a visual artist working primarily as a painter. Savdie was raised between Barranquilla, Colombia and Miami, Florida. Her solo exhibition Ilava Savdie: Radical Contradictions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, in 2023, presented an expansive view of her pictorial interests and artistic practice. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.