Everybody Tells You That It’s Going to Be Okay by Ian Cappelli

Everybody Tells You That It’s Going to Be Okay

but you remember middle school, that time you told your buddy the same thing. You’d spent the day trading cards. He’d lost one of yours in his cargo short pocket without you noticing. Sitting on it until it bent, while telling you his mom was missing. For 30 days, he said, that’s a long time. You didn’t realize the gravity of this. You told him: it’s going to be okay. 14 years old. Then the tree in your yard was cut into PAC-MAN—to make room for the phonelines. That winter, you woke up to empty windows. Later on, he punted your snowman into the garage, and your sister walked out in a rage before realizing. When your mother faints from the flu, they strap her to the stretcher. All the little branches, cut into a crescent. At the moment of severance, they crackle into each other. They foliate the asphalt. When your body is found in the forest, it is covered with snow.               

Ian Cappelli (he, him) is the 2021/22 thesis fellow from GMU and has authored the chapbook ‘Suburban Hermeneutics’ (Cathexis Northwest Press, 2019). His work has recently appeared, or is forthcoming, in Sugar House Review, Lunch Ticket, South Florida Poetry Journal, and the American Journal of Poetry, among others.