“How I Know I Love You”
by Kelsey L. Smoot
because you come up in my house, pouring yourself big cups of the juice I buy from the farmer’s market, knowing damn well how much it costs, and I’m steady smiling—grateful you still have a mouth with which to drink. To be real, I’m just honored to witness you. We dance in my kitchen, drunk, making 3 am egg sandwiches while listening to Glorilla, and you wait until I’ve already called your Uber before you begin to cry. In an instant, my arms are around your neck and we are so quiet. You whisper “my nigga, they were so young” and I nod against your melted cheek, and when you get up to leave, I am terrified of how my heart follows. We call each other twin and my g, and I try to tamp down the masculinity hulking between us. But it’s always been so fun with you: pretending we are big and bad together, scattering across the suburbs as two misfits, boys with Kool-Aid smiles and quick tempers. Now, we stand in this kitchen as self-made mercurial men, holding one another, weeping for all of the people who no longer have mouths with which to drink.
I love you, I love you, I love you twin
is an incantation over your head to keep you safe, and here, even when you are hurting. Even when you go to that far-off place inside of yourself where I can’t protect you. I know I love you because I am hurting too. Because I feel gorgeous under your watchful eye. Because we have never quite known what to say to one another, but our shared quiet is a soak in Epsom salt and chamomile. I know I love you when I crawl into bed, open our text thread, and watch the small blinking circle of you as it traces the web of streets between us. I shut my eyes only when I’m certain that you’ve made it home.
Kelsey L. Smoot (they/he/Kelz) is a gender theorist, an elective Southerner, a writer, and a poet. Their autoethnographic style has become the lens through which they understand and reflect on their experience navigating the US sociopolitical landscape. They are the winner of the 2021 Sad Girls Club Spring Literary Contest, the 2023 The Good Life Review Honeybee Prize, and the Grand Prize Winner of the 2024 Button Poetry Video Contest. He is a Tin House Workshop alum, a Pushcart Prize nominee, a Best of the Net nominee, and a Best New Poets nominee. Proudly, Kelz is the author of two chapbooks: we was bois together with CLASH! (An Imprint of Mouthfeel Press) and Muse, with Another New Calligraphy.