A curtain of lottery tickets shades the sun in the pharmacy,

casino cold.

Last night, I crashed a wedding reception at the Central Park Boathouse and ate a lobster in

anonymity.

I broke in just like all those raccoons, so many, none invited.

What I wouldn’t give to grab an arm right now.

I put my legs around a sign, arms up, crazed, sexualized, and fearless,

like the abandoned nightclub hidden by pink oleanders alongside the old highway.

I’m outdoors with the gambling man and the broken redness of morning.

He and I used to taste like hot Turkish coffee.

We were once wrapped in burgundy velvet, he talked

under the morning green coffee tree.

My oolong had smelled like a fight, like a motorboat from the dock.

His cotton shirt states away.

Unlike him. His dark moustache and quiet love for another man,

that first report of oxygen at an altitude untouched.

The comfort of walking out alongside

a lonely jaguar.

I am so close to that perversion.

Lauren Hilger is the author of Morality Play (Poetry NW Editions, 2022). She serves as a poetry editor for No Tokens. Dionissios Kollias's work has appeared in Hobart, Pinwheel, and elsewhere. He lives in New York. Their collaborations have been published in GlitterMOB, Image, Pinhole Poetry, Zone 3, and elsewhere.