The Day You Died My Life Was Shaved Ice

TSB’s Poet Laureate series returns. This month’s poet: Anthony Thomas Lombardi.

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Those of you who read The Small Bow newsletter regularly know that poetry has been an important part of my recovery. Every morning, I read a poem as part of my daily journal and reading routine. This began in 2017, when I was working my way through early sobriety. I discovered a poem that I loved — Stephen Dunn’s “The Inheritance.” From there, I began to seek out more contemporary stuff, poems that I read for pure enjoyment. Poems that offered me recognizable worlds and helped me access some of the disorienting feelings I was navigating in early sobriety.

In order to better promote poetry and the poets who write it on TSB, I’m starting a monthly series called “TSB’s Poet Laureate Club” where I’ll feature one poet per month whose work I dig and have found an excellent complement to my recovery.

This month’s poet laureate is Anthony Thomas Lombardi. Anthony’s collection murmurations (YesYes Books, 2025) can be found here.

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Let a Dog Roam & He’ll Find His Way Home

by Anthony Thomas Lombardi

It was 2021 & we were all still sort of standing around wondering what the hell had happened to the world we used to know. Seven million breaths lighter, beloveds & strangers alike lost to us. Alongside the lives taken by COVID were the vulnerable spared by the virus but cut down by a state growing more reckless & malevolent by the day, slashing away every safety net that hung below us. The number of addicts who fell is blurry statistically but I can tell you that in my own life, personally, I lost count by the end of 2020.

May marked seven years since my best friend Scott’s overdose, a suicide. When he died I was off the deep end, careening through my worst year (which would only get worse the next year), ignoring his increasingly incoherent & troubling phone calls & voicemails. Scott spent years picking up every single time I dialed, often at 3 or 4 in the morning, talking me down whatever ledge I was on at any given time. Even his mother would grab the phone sometimes, try to talk some sense into me while always offering a soft landing.

I was not a landing of any kind. I was all later for that when he needed me, blew off one text too many. I had drugs to do, strangers to sleep with, booze to drown in. When I got the call from our mutual friend, Rob, I was half into a bag of blow with some half-dressed woman whose name I could not summon for the life of me, & I immediately started sobbing, hyperventilating. I have to tell you, I don’t remember much of the next year & a half. Scott’s death catalyzed my own slow, painful spiral to my bottom. I was intentionally trying to kill myself at this point & trying to do it in the most painful way that I could think of: suicidal drinking. It was what I deserved, I told myself, told others. Friends began to walk away from me. Relationships crashed & burned. I graduated from snorting & smoking dope to shooting it. One of my friends called it with the bat of a lash. “Your eyes are black,” he explained.

Then I finally bottomed out. I walked out of detox Halloween 2015, evading death by mere millimeters, the doctors told me. I was tending bar the next day. I had no choice. I had to pay my rent & I didn’t know how to do anything else. I never slipped, not even a little — by the grace of God — & today I am gratefully a decade sober. As each year drags on, sobriety becomes a more complex beast than I’d ever expected it would be. Still, I can’t help wondering, daily, why me? Why not Scott? Why did God spare me & not him? It still doesn’t seem fair but if I’ve learned anything in my thirty-six years on this planet, it’s that fairness has got nothing to do with it.

Swing back around & for seven years I tried to write it out. Write it through. Write it down. Nothing. Not a line, not a word. Then DMX died. The streets were filled with his music, spilling out of car windows, slinking from boomboxes on stoops. Another one lost. I grew up on X. My childhood navigating these city streets, the project hallways, alleys you dipped into to hide or to cop, all scored by It’s Dark and Hell is Hot; Flesh of My Flesh, Blood of My Blood; & …And Then There Was X. These albums raised me. I did not take the death lightly, as with any death, but the fallen addicts just hit the heart different for me, leave wider wounds.

It was May 2021 & I sat on a bench with a beloved of mine in Prospect Park. The world was starting to open its windows, air it all out. Most of us stuck to the outdoors when we met up with our friends & family, but it was a beautiful spring. Maybe the hope of new beginnings was part of that point of view, but we all felt it. A man wearing one of those homemade RIP shirts we rock back in the ’hood with DMX’s face all over it — clouds around him, cherubic but fierce — wheeled in a large speaker & began playing “Ruff Ryders’ Anthem” at what felt like beyond full volume, like the notes were stretching to their breaking point to reach the heavens. That buzzy feeling of renewal crawled up my spine again. A cherry blossom spun softly to the ground. Another followed, then another, one of them landing on my open palm. I went home & wrote this poem.

on Survivor’s Guilt ending with “Ruff Ryders’ Anthem” by DMX

for Scott

by Anthony Thomas Lombardi

*****

i thought i saw your face, your unmistakable
gait on the 6 train
—i’m wrong.
blessings refused maybe
or imagined.
it is May. i am tired of being naive.
the day you died my life was shaved ice
& shocked mint, whiskey still cutting a hem
closer than the garment seamed by God.
maybe, dear reader, you were thirsty once
or twice upon a time. maybe we don’t speak
anymore but on a day of days i sated something
in you less sin than sunder. by which i mean
these were the Springs i made of everyone
a requiem. by which i mean
my lonely was unrequited.
pewter cups clicked like prayer beads
as i crafted juleps for prim mouths
grown wild beneath wide brims while men
cinched into uniform whipped horses, drank
at the waters of Lethe
& i too am not blameless of brute
force in the service of darkening soil.
i have forgotten that old friends are dead.
my beloved wears a blue threadbare shirt
of her old school’s hockey team, games
she’d attend purely to see two bodies
exchange a violence approaching love.
at what point does the body cease
its sovereignty & become a thing
to be plucked & played?
if you’re lucky, it will bring you to your knees.
i walk past a movie theater,
everyone outside seems so displeased
cast in the lobby’s static glow.
is it not enough to sit somewhere
dark & see a beautiful face, huge?
in Prospect Park, i see God
saw X’s face fit to spill
off a Gildan, the kind we wear
with kin round the way, old photos
kissed by clouds, lurid as a bullhorn
to squeeze another drop of life
loudly out of the lost. X barks
then escapes the mourner’s
hands like he’s cheating
some untoward coda, fingers
on a speaker’s knob coaxing
the cardinals to swallow their song.
the cherry blossoms today
blooming finally & one falls
with a hustler’s grace, spins
then perches on my shoulder, remains
a moment, without a breeze
another petal, perhaps racing
to dismantle the distance, eddies
behind, pining, staccato
as X commands stop.
drop. lands, covering the scar
on my open palm, the other
blessing me one more bow
before coming to rest amongst the soil.

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Anthony Thomas Lombardi is a writer, educator, organizer, & romantic in revolt. He is the author of murmurations (YesYes Books, 2025); the founder & director of Word is Bond, a community-centered benefit reading series that raises funds for transnational relief efforts & mutual aid organizations; & runs Verses & Voltas, a pedagogical poetry service specializing in workshops, mentorship programming, manuscript consultations & feedback, & more. He has taught or continues to teach with Borough of Manhattan Community College, Paris College of Art, Brooklyn Poets, Florida State University, Polyphony Lit’s apprenticeship programming, & community programming throughout New York City & currently serves as a poetry editor for Sundog Lit. His work has appeared or will soon in Best New Poets, Ploughshares, Missouri Review, Black Warrior Review, Nashville Review, Narrative Magazine, & elsewhere. He lives & loves in Brooklyn with his cat, Dilla. He believes in a Free Palestine & thinks you should too.

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