a ballad for my best friend // Hayden Armos
from judge Todd Robinson: “a ballad for my best friend” cartwheels on a knife’s edge for forty sublime lines, innocence grappling with experience, sense with sensibility, delight with torment. It’s such a nimble and inviting poem, rich in charms and vexed with harms. The sound and sense here! Each verb a plosion, the momentum relentless as the tenderness. I would give much to write a poem this sweet and salty, this luminous and lonely. The poet constantly swerves, yet strikes their target with an unerring eye. This is serious play; this is joyful work.
for M
1.
deranged, I asked if you would come
with me into the pink abyss.
you said, it doesn’t matter what color the abyss is.
instead, let's say the abyss was a tunnel.
train tracks lined the tunnel—the downward pitch of it.
graffiti swarmed the walls. laughing, you said,
let's race, and you threw off your shoes.
together, we somersaulted down
that hysterical kaleidoscope of nonautonomy.
afterward, like little kids,
we made up stories about what we saw.
for you it was: shame, shame, shame.
I said, me too.
2.
and, because you had me feeling sentimental,
I also told you about the horse I met—how at first
she was shy inside her luminous coat.
from the edge, she observed me falling
and burning, all meteorite-like
and ablated.
what I had become: a bright red ache.
the horse came to me then,
and as she unteased me from the wreckage,
the song of my heartbeat
against her bones was full and sweet.
you see, I had just one thing
left to give the horse.
I gave her rivers and rivers of it.
3.
one day, when I am old and gone,
you will remind me of the California poppies
waving us on with their caution orange,
the rolling hills flashing
green in our teeth. and I will tell you
of the anadromous fish—
how, against all odds, an alewife
swims ten miles upstream
to die in the same place it was born.
you will say, that's so me, and
I will nod, strumming my June guitar,
watching as fireflies punctuate
the black sky with their light.
Hayden Armos (he/they) originally hails from an island in the heart of the Pacific Northwest's Puget Sound. After graduating from college, he settled in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he currently lives with his ex-roommates two cats and works at a youth services nonprofit. His poetry explores intimacy, attention, wonder, and grief. You can read more in Gigantic Sequins, Salt Hill Journal, Press Pause Press, and Lost Pilots Lit. Instagram: @harmosarmos