One Poem
by Christian Paulisich
Fences
The man across the alley heaves
sunflower seed shells over the deck
which catch in the wind like pollen.
He thumbs his cigarette, matches
my gaze. Smile. No. Read.
Eyes darker now, he slips
his hand into his orange running shorts.
Thousands of miles from my hometown
where the boy next door touched his sister for years,
the way I was—
evening breeze teases
relief, bracing my cheeks.
Standing in the doorway,
I swat off phantom hands like flies
and close the door behind me.
Christian Paulisich received his B.A. from the Johns Hopkins University and is a Master’s candidate at Towson University. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland, but is originally from the Bay Area, California. He was recently chosen as an honorable mention for the 2024 Gulf Coast Prize for Poetry and a finalist for Frontier Poetry's 2024 Nature & Place Contest, and received a Summer 2024 fellowship from Brooklyn Poets. His work has been published in or is forthcoming from The Southeast Review, Frontier, Literary Matters, Denver Quarterly, the Atlanta Review, New American Writing, and other magazines. You can find him on Instagram: @christian.paulisich