10/31/2012

Don’t say you love me.
Tell me you’d slit the throats
of all your other boys
sleeping beautifully in their beds.
Me, I’m never in my own bed.

AUTHOR'S NOTE:

I started typing out the first line of this poem, a more elaborate version I should say, as a text message to the guy I was sleeping with. Thank god my iPhone autocorrect slowed me down because as I was trying to fix the autocorrect I realized the guy wasn’t worth talking to. Not the first time that has happened and I’m sure it won’t be the last. But anyhow, I really wanted to send the text anyway (you know when that happens?) even though I knew it was a bad idea. Somehow I restrained myself, and well, this medium, where readers receive poems as text messages, presented itself as the perfect opportunity to finally send it, although of course he will never receive it. But who cares. He’s not important. I like that the poem was conceived from an unsent text message and that in the end it becomes a text that is sent. But to a reader. Who is more important. Always.

BIO:

Alex Dimitrov’s first book of poems, Begging for It, will be published by Four Way Books in March 2013. He is the founder of Wilde Boys, a queer poetry salon in New York City. Dimitrov’s poems have been published in The Yale Review, The Kenyon Review, Slate, Poetry Daily, Tin House, Boston Review, and the American Poetry Review, which awarded him the Stanley Kunitz Prize in 2011. He is also the author of American Boys, an e-chapbook published by Floating Wolf Quarterly in 2012. Dimitrov works at the Academy of American Poets, teaches creative writing at Rutgers University, and frequently writes for Poets & Writers.
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