Follow Your Saint by B. Hanley

 
Follow Your Saint

up the fire escape.

Mine is Jude.
I follow him
up the rusted stairs
and sit outside
a window.

I remember nothing
from Catholic school
like I remember
Jude.

I smoke a cigarette
and look at laundry hanging
on a line
on a balcony
across from me.

Someone’s shirt
is there,
someone’s hopeless,
lost cause
because it starts to rain,
and the thing will
not dry
this night
as planned.

I follow him
to see this
and much more.

It looks like
I have an eye
for the almost
hopeless.

Really I’m just
following my saint
to see it.

Up the fire escape
into the bar
into a bedroom
to that desk
at that dead end job
around these corners
around and around,
I follow my saint,
not Anthony, the guy you talk to
when you’ve lost something,
but Jude, the guy you talk to
when you’re losing it.

B. Hanley has a degree in writing from St. Edward’s University, lives in Houston, and writes internet marketing copy for a living. Her poems have been published in the Sorin Oak Review and Forty Ounce Bachelors.
 

Other things you might want to read:

Beth by James P. Hanley I Watch Documentaries Instead of Horror Films by Tracy Dimond Ode to a Man in a White Minivan by Anna Bernstein Two poems by Kathryn Merwin