World Champs

Six of us sat at the table, three to a side. Each eye stared at a stranger, each arm leaned into a friend. We picked up a seventh just as word came the eighth was wandering lost alone.

We found her in a college intersection then piled under the warmth of a street vendor tent. Of the sisters she’d just seen, I was told to bite my tongue. Sierra and Bianca Casady took a stage in Minneapolis some six years ago and banged on children’s toys to my discontent.

The party was theirs. So shook the bottoms of all the hip young white kids in the city scene. And as he screamed how fabulous the show had been over the noise of my favorite records, I was glad that the girls had come.

The DJ pulled on heartstrings with songs danced to death at other clubs. So we stayed the night there, not clocking in how long we had been. At last I whispered we were about to close down the place, pushed bodies towards their coats.

We ended up where we always do: sleeping next to stockpiled strangers, face down on a hot hard floor.