I Love My Friends by Rob Macaisa Colgate

Arin and Rachel take shrooms on the same day
I skip my meds so we can all trip together.

Every time I am sitting with friends on a blanket 
at Grange Park at 6pm drinking carton rosé I’m like,

This is what I was born to do.

Every time I am fetal on the plastic disk swing 
at 2am, Gabbie watching from the slide, mumbling 
to myself illegal illegal illegal illegal, I’m like,

I guess this is also what I was born to do.

I have no photos from these picnics
though I can picture them more clearly than any other part of my life.

These tiny sacred moments.

I pick Colwill up from the airport, take side streets home so we can keep 
the windows down without having to shout our gossip 

over the wind. Jody and I giggle non sequiturs in the chat
while the Zoom presenter tries to turn on captions and share 

their screen. I apologize to Peter for sleeping until noon during our visit 
and he laughs, says my grogginess is the most beautiful thing about me.

This is just what I can remember.
Arin and Rachel take shrooms on the same day
I skip my meds so we can all trip together.

Every time I am sitting with friends on a blanket 
at Grange Park at 6pm drinking carton rosé I’m like,

This is what I was born to do.

Every time I am fetal on the plastic disk swing 
at 2am, Gabbie watching from the slide, mumbling 
to myself illegal illegal illegal illegal, I’m like,

I guess this is also what I was born to do.

I have no photos from these picnics
though I can picture them more clearly than any other part of my life.

These tiny sacred moments.

I pick Colwill up from the airport, take side streets home so we can keep 
the windows down without having to shout our gossip 

over the wind. Jody and I giggle non sequiturs in the chat
while the Zoom presenter tries to turn on captions and share 

their screen. I apologize to Peter for sleeping until noon during our visit 
and he laughs, says my grogginess is the most beautiful thing about me.

This is just what I can remember.

Rob Macaisa Colgate (he/she/they) is the author of the poetry collection Hardly Creatures (Tin House, 2025) and the verse drama My Love is Water (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2025). A 2024 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow, he lives in Chicago and serves as managing poetry editor of Foglifter. 

17 February 2025