The Lost Yeses
Marcia LeBeau

They are alive. The ones you couldn’t bring
yourself to utter. Some are small, simply toed
into the sand. Some alchemized into wire & learned
how to dance. There are yeses that bare their breasts & grit
their teeth. And those that fly around frantically
like diseased bats, or crawl into your yard at midnight
to set off the sprinklers. Yeses that show up on the sidewalk drunk
are the same ones that get kicked out of the library
for talking too loud. Yeses that want to learn from Knight Rider,
but are thirty years too late. Yeses that can’t find
the pencil sharpener, so they are forced to whittle themselves
down with a pocketknife. Those who swear they’ve met you before,
but you find out those yeses were lying. Yeses that road-trip through
the desert without looking up from their guidebooks. The most
melancholy of all the yeses? The ones who just want to tell you
what you’ve always wanted to hear, but can’t.

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