In a Graveyard at Sunset by Jacob Butlett

​In a Graveyard at Sunset
 
While the sun’s smoky red curtains
close across the sky,
I can’t stop thinking of him.
 
I remember the summer
they buried him, the same summer
he and I slept in the same bed,
 
the same summer he started smoking
and drinking recklessly,
with joyful abandon, I believed.
 
During our final nights that summer,
while we sat holding each other under
pine trees in the backyard,
 
moonlight like rain winked
in his black curly hair--
a garden of light smelling of lavender
 
shampoo, which I had bought for him
weeks earlier, at the same time I bought
the gun he later used on himself.
 
Come back, I whisper. Come back,
though he never will, though
even now, as the red sky darkens,
 
I imagine him floating overhead,
and I swear, I swear, if I reach out,
I can touch him once more.

Jacob Butlett is a gay author with an Associates of Arts in General Studies and a bachelor's of arts in Creative Writing. In 2012 he earned a Scholastic Art & Writing Awards Gold Key for his fiction; in 2017 he won the Bauerly-Roseliep Scholarship for excellence in literary studies and creative writing; in 2018 he received a Pushcart Prize nomination for his poetry. Some of his work has been published in The MacGuffin, Panoply, Cacti Fur, Gone Lawn, Word Fountain, Lunch Ticket, Fterota Logia, Into the Void, and plain china.  

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