save for the shitty under-aged tattoos, you’d never know i was once sixteen—
your dad’s hot tub a gumbo of gumption and too-cool girls
cash crumpled and rediscovered under the passenger seat, winning us a pall mall lottery
we were once almost-everything: eighteen, virgins, tall enough to ride this ride
don’t remember much about how i came to be this languid lover of well-made shoes;
accept that time is never on your side, and you’ll have much more of it to lose, but
it never even occurred to me: you’re becoming mostly memory
⠀
on the first, however, i write these checks and carry on
board member of many things, director of none
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 Pushcart Prize nominee, a Best of the Net nominee, and proudly, the author of two chapbooks: we was bois together with CLASH! (An Imprint of Mouthfeel Press) and Muse, with Another New Calligraphy.