Benjamin Bellet is a clinical psychologist and military veteran who treats young adults with serious mental illness in Boston, Massachusetts. His poems have been published in Colorado Review, MAYDAY Magazine, Peripheries, and elsewhere.

Pearl Street & Granite

I was hoping it would remain empty,
the seat next to me.

You came & pressed against me
calf to calf, arm to arm,

back-meat to back-meat,
every press of the bus stopping

sudden as if
to show she means it.

She means it. Interrupted
by inertia & skin, I am

sure now—
She means it. I must stop

every few. Hard.
I didn’t ask to know so well

your skin. I’m sentimental, chaste
or constipated.

Pray for a stop so severe
this man will press to me

as tongue to wafer, or coal.
Pressed back into stained Moquette seats,

foot braced to the floor.
Your skin to my skin through my skin

at raw speed,
no more hovering, ghosts.

No more sideways glances
through sun-blurred lashes,

pretty white shoes,
no more reading to get attention,

hunched over a labor
all eyes and bowels,

unable to push
the last line.

After the Rain

we are on each other’s hands.
One pair of iridescent shoes, proffered.

One nice ass. Two wet man-buns toasting
in a shrinking sun. One says

last night was lit. Outside,
a deepening green.

I think of loved ones & feel nothing.

Women in tights on scooters
coast placid down the sidewalk,

the sun changing hands on their thighs.

I’m trying to let it
affect me the right way,

worried of staring too long,
of my hand gripping

the yellow rail, as if to choke
the fact of afternoon’s

lengthening softness, your breath

swarming
my assenting ear,

the other man saying
you know I crushed.

I’m trying not to think of you specifically,
but really I am.

That’s the problem.