“We Catch Up Over Beers After Your Divorce,” Poem, Isabelle Correa.

We talk college days and step kids, dogs

and driving a manual in Vietnam, your studio

in Portland, how we’ve only ever fucked twice,

both times on the floor, and what might have been

if we’d known how to make each other happy.

I tell you, I like the way you speak.

You’ve got a tongue worth paying attention to.

I tell you, I want to be friends. I want to be friends

who think about tearing each other open,

mad and wet and sorry with nostalgia

for a life we didn’t live together.

I’m doing fine, as in, my body takes up space

and hardly anyone notices I’m a yawn

away from dissolving. Pity makes a soul

porous and people like us whistle

when the wind blows. We remember

being young together—all that trust

in the goodness of our own lives,

where did it go? Maybe I’ll find it

by sucking on your shoulders.

I want you unreasonably.

I remember touching you

in ways I never have.

Isabelle Correa is a poet from Washington state living in Mexico City. She studied creative writing at Western Washington University, is a Pushcart Prize nominee, and is the author of the chapbook Sex is From Mars But I Love You From Venus. She is a winner of the 2024 Jack McCarthy Book Prize with Write Bloody Publishing for her debut full-length collection, Good Girl and Other Yearnings. Her work has appeared in Hobart, Pank, The Rebis, and more. Find her on Instagram: @isabellecorreawrites and on Substack: A Poem Is A Place.