Damon Hubbs

The Year I Fell in Love with a Dimes Square Girl

the Dimes Square girls are at it again 
reading Lunch Poems 2 over lunches amuse-bouche,
the sky like a mango flavored Juul, Manhattan at noon 

is a wet brain and when I finally heal from the trauma 
of a happy childhood I find every pussy at the corner of Canal 
and Orchard to be a Beaux-Arts shrine

to acronyms and floating signifiers. Here is one hand
of the Red Scare. And here is another 
trembling with the psychic power that Kunst 

is the German world for “art.” 
O to be young, to navigate you 
like an open manhole on Second Avenue, 

you fucked with breakneck inventiveness
aesthetic and artifice,
we shot the dawn like Burroughs

missing badly, because you hated Burroughs 
preferred Ferlinghetti, and besides 
that was the same night Nikki went toe-to-toe

with Death’s six serpent sons,
and Hans got busted doing coke in the Swan Room
and Thom didn’t have a clue about the Sally Fowler Rat Pack

our love was doomed time and time thereafter 
a decade late and a trust fund short,
your desire to be desired so fleeting I couldn’t keep up.