David Ly

Celebrity Sighting: Michael Fassbender

By David Ly

It’s Wednesday, which means I can be an optimist or a pessimist. I decide to not make
all love songs I have on my phone about you. A guy sitting across from me on this bus

looks like he could pass for Michael Fassbender in his late twenties. His ear buds are in,
and he’s wearing a tight fitting baby blue polo. If the universe is rewarding me for

imagining more realistic rationales for why I made the mistakes I did with you,
Fassbender and I here would be in a romantic indie movie. He’s now texting, or changing

the song on his phone, while I type all of this into mine. It’s Wednesday, which means it
has been two (or three) weeks since I last spoke with you and I have decided to let

memories of me haunt you through love songs you forgot you had on your phone.
Michael Fassbender’s young doppelgänger takes out one of his ear buds.

He tilts his head up, and I prepare to maybe mumble a hello, but our eyes only meet for a
second. He looks to the map above my head for what the next stop will be.

And if the universe is kind, he won’t get off there. Because that’s where you got off and
never came back to me. Fassbender stays on the bus. We pass your stop and he makes a

few quick swipes on his phone, puts his ear buds back in, and relaxes back into his seat,
hopefully listening to a song that wouldn’t remind me of you.

Dream of Me as Water

By David Ly

I’ll hold on to your breath for you
            and you can call me friend
        swim with me
in this derelict pool
        infested with cuttlefish        dive down
the neon motel sign watches over us
dive deep
            out of sight from your god
        hold me tight
the cuttlefish flash a mosaic
of neons
        for the stars to know        that they can’t
have you        just yet
            they’ll have to come down to us
if they want you        when you don’t wake

David Ly's photo was taken by Pedro Lacerda Muniz. You can find his work here.

David Ly’s poems have appeared in a range of anthologies and magazines, including The Puritan, PRISM international, and Ricepaper Magazine. He has also written for VICE, Daily Xtra, and NUVO. In 2017, he was long-listed for the Thomas Morton Memorial Prize in Poetry. His first chapbook, Stubble Burn, is published with Anstruther Press. He is a graduate from SFU’s Master of Publishing program and the Marketing Assistant at UBC Press. Find David on Twitter @dlylyly.