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.
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