"I Want You to Look at Me the Way You Did at the Jimmy Eat World Show, but I Don’t Know What That Means So I Play It Back" by Adam Shaw

You leaned toward me with your mouth open so wide that I thought your jaw had

popped. Your eyes carried slivers of blue and gold on their surfaces, moody and joyful

and the colors of the state of Indiana, maybe Kentucky. Maybe both, but definitely Bleed

American. You put your hand on my shoulder and looked up with your eyes, not your

head, your pupils shifting from the floor to me like a satellite adjusting its signal. I dreamt

of being your focus forever, you mine, but in the end you’d just found it funny that I'd made a dumb joke, aren’t they old enough to be James Eat World by now?, and I found

it funny that you couldn’t stop laughing, so we laughed together, fell into one another

like trees propping each other up before falling, crashing in the woods. I wrapped my

arm around your waist, buried my lips in your hair and kissed your head, called you by

your AIM screen name while “Get Right” pounded our ears, while you cackled into my

shoulder, while Jim Adkins sang I just gotta be someplace else and I dreamt of being no

place else. And that’s what I want, really. The dream of being no place else.

Adam Shaw lives with his wife and daughter in Louisville, Kentucky. He is the author of the novel The Jackals and the memoir Sportsman’s Paradise, and his work can be found in Pithead Chapel, HAD, Rejection Letters, and elsewhere. He can be found online at theshawspot.com.