Night-Things – Adeline Swartzendruber

July 22, 2025

Green Lights

 
Stoned and relieved we both cried,
“I am a sober professional!”
At home I admit that I lied
while writing my latest confessional.
Where would I go if not here?
Someone else’s old high school bar,
or else the detested Red Room,
or Sovereign House’s backyard.
Or maybe alone in my bed;
A bender bent all on my own,
or rather with my oldest friends,
dead poets so I’m not alone.

And everyone wants me to win.
I’m building a castle of cans,
the floor will be there again when
the palace has crumbled again.
The air is rife with rotting flesh
masked by fog of Miami Mint.
My soul and my body won’t thresh,
the flame won’t spark out of the flint,
and everyone wants me to win;
The figurines of distant men
on a shelf, their green lights flashing
just like mine — something to believe in.
They see my soul dance on the lake
and hope it’s there when the doves mourn,
but that light is no match for the day,
and their love is no match for my scorn.

Will they be proud of me still?
When my picture flashes black and white,
when my author bio is a eulogy,
when I go gently into that night.
I suspect they might feel some relief —
when there’s nothing to be kept alive
but a glimmering persona’s memory,
who wants— needs no help to survive.
But everyone wants me to win;
They can tell that I could if I tried.
I have what they didn’t, or lost,
or were told they had by those who lied.

Perhaps it’s the mode of a coward
to give it all up while you’re young,
before you’ve a chance to be old
and a failure, to finish before you’ve begun.
I suppose I’ve got some time left still
to become my potential’s carcass.
I reach for my vape and pick up my inhaler,
and think of my dead uncle Marcus
when he, like Icarus, fell,
at age forty-two, sans grandeur;
We all thought he’d go out like Hunter S. Thompson,
but he just tumbled drunk down the stairs.
Evidently, without a loud thud.
As it must have took hours to find him.
If I stumble and croak at St. Dymphna’s,
I hope that you notice my absence
much quicker. But then, maybe not.
I’ll be finished before I begin.
And everyone wants me to win.
And everyone wants me to win.
And everyone wants me to win.

 
 
Hope

 
It seems all my hope is stored in your chest. I mostly feel it when you’re holding me. But I do feel it; your nacreous skin in the moonlight barely sneaking through the crack beneath the blind. Everything inhumanly crystalline, inhumanly soft. We did make it, even just one night. Totally sober, if you discount the weed, and I liked you. I liked you contemplative, I liked you judgmental. You liked me with easy tears and tentative laughter. I could feel it there.
“Alcohol softens me.”
“Yeah, but other things can soften you.”
“Like your presence.”
Half-bashful giggling —
“You set me up for that one.”
“I did.”
I could put together that book. We could go for auditions. Who cares that our friends are junkies living in a time capsule, the shadow of the halcyon days of Dimes Square. Who cares that we don’t know a single normal person. Who cares. You were me, once. Shit, I was me, once. The type of person whose charisma is confined to the scripted, bubbling with ambition, who swore off the malediction of settling into patterns.
I don’t want to die.
I want my ghost in the projector.
I want to see another continent.
I am appalled by poets who lack passion, but that lives in more beautiful places.
I could write about children. It’s not all bloody noses and gravestones.
Then I head home.
Google: How to be sober without being crushed by the vastness of time?
All I get is a helpline. I need something better on the other end.
Time-skip to 2 A.M. — Maybe it ends when you’re drunk writing poems about getting sober. I don’t like this place. My floor is too cluttered to dance. I remember the way you shimmy your shoulders in-between moments, and the way I laugh. You tell me to have the best day ever, and I fail. But please do it again. Put on that voice — any of them. The neurotic mother worried about her daughter, the German accent from our short film which may never come out. You can even sing. I’ll try to hear it. Over the whir of the fan and the rumbling train, from across the river. Send smoke signals. Morse code. I’m looking for it.
You told me dreams are only premonitions if you believe they are. I want one good dream.
Three-dollar noodles from the last remaining restaurant with a heart. That lone, free wisp of dark hair falling over your forehead.
The idea of a world outside of this.
I thought I ran for freedom, but I ran for a dark corner in which to die alone, like a cat. Find me.
When I was fifteen I saw a different world. Where I’m from the sky has more stars. I crept into the yard when all the windows went black. I held my cat in my arms, trusting him not to run from me, so he could see it too. We sat on the gray, creaking deck and watched night-things scurry out and under it, and neither of us was afraid. I know that sky is there for me, still. For both of us.

 
 
For Kerr

 
Sometimes I traverse
the long night between
who I was and who I am.
Before the plague
that flattened time,
and all the love
I wrenched out of me and gave
to your stand-ins;
growing up sometimes makes
you grow backwards —
when the man you love
can look much like
a mentor, or a father.
But back then, things were more
clearly delineated.
And when I stumble on
a time traveling device —
old notebooks, or your
feedback, screenshotted —-
I remember how you once
believed in me.
Sitting backstage
in a dinky auditorium
recording voice-over audio
for a play, for an audience
of teenagers’ parents.
You always rationed out
your compliments. So it’s enough
when you say:
“You know, you’re pretty good at this.”

Tonight I read your letter back;
I came to Sarah Lawrence
highly recommended.
“A model student, actress, and,
frankly,
human being.”

And I’m so
sorry.

I’m sorry for dropping that class
in 2020.
I’m sorry for rolling my eyes
when assigned passages
from the Bible.
I’m sorry for never writing.
I’m sorry I just failed out of school.
I hope you won’t be sad.

All it means is I have
to stand, someday,
on a world stage,
golden figurine in my hand;

So that I can say

“And most of all, I need to thank
Mr Kerr. Thank you
for believing in me. Thank you
for giving me a chance
to play women — and men —
whose lives exist so much
apart from mine. Thank you
for giving me books to read
that sent me to the Congo,
to the 1500s, to the heart
of a monster that was really
just a child who wasn’t loved.
Thank you for telling me
I could do this —
and for telling me the stories
that made me want to.

I hope you’re still watching.”