Loss and Its Antonym

By: ALISON PRINE

The opposite of losing you
was watching you across the purple light
of the dance floor in the local gay bar
while the salt trucks dragged through the streets.

We had our people back then—
Janet all night at the pool table
and Kevin by the men’s room a little drunk
and smearing his mascara—
and our song, an anthem
for falling hard into each other’s lives.

That winter we proved that being terrified
doesn’t prevent you from being happy—
even when the guy on Church Street
threw a bottle at us and called us dykes
on our way back to my place where
we ate ice cream out of the carton
at 2am drunk on our bodies
and the snow storm and a conversation
I can’t remember but we are still having it.

I want to learn to write about the loves
that haven’t died—yellowed paperbacks
with broken spines, the stillness of the lake
from the fishing pier on winter mornings,
the people in this small city
I sometimes recognize on the sidewalk
a decade after our bar shut down.

 

ALISON PRINE’s collection of poems, Steel, won the Cider Press Review Book Award and was released in 2016. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Virginia Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, FIELD, Hunger Mountain, and Prairie Schooner, among other publications. She lives in Burlington, Vermont, where she works as a psychotherapist.

 

[Purchase Issue 14 here.]

From the beginning, The Common has brought you transportive writing and exciting new voices. We are committed to supporting writers and maintaining free, unrestricted access to our website, but we can’t do it without you. Become an integral part of our global community of readers and writers by donating today. No amount is too small. Thank you!

Loss and Its Antonym

Related Posts

Contrail across blue sky

July 2025 Poetry Feature: New Poems by our Contributors

GEOFFREY BROCK
Sing, O furrow-browed youth, / of the contrails scoring the sky, / bright as lines of cocaine / until, as they age, the eye // loses them to the blue… / Sing of the thin-skinned plane / that made those ephemeral clouds, / and of all that each contains: // the countless faceless strangers

Fenway Park

Before They Traded Devers

AIDAN COOPER
I don’t know I’m not paying attention I’m crunching / peanut shells thinking Murakami began to write novels / because of baseball why don’t I / my dad’s grumpy / I’m vegetarian now & didn’t want a frank & yes it’s probably / a phase he’s probably right but it’s a good phase

Cover of All Is The Telling by Rosa Castellano

An Embodied Sense of Time: Raychelle Heath Interviews Rosa Castellano

ROSA CASTELLANO
I’m holding a blank page all the time for myself. That’s a truth that I choose to believe in: the blank page is a tool for our collective liberation. It can be how we keep going. I love that we can find each other on the page and heal each other, too. So, I invoke that again and again, for myself, because I need it.