Shipwrecked Poetry

Marble Soul

2012-01-11T03:59:00.001-08:00

When I flip through the pages of the past,
it goes like this:
yesterday, with open windows
first neat and cut
laid out side by side
and then sloppy as I go back farther, towards childhood.
I remember the red door, the smell of the dog’s food.
I remember the bookshelf low to the ground
page after page after page
and the murmuring groan of feet on hardwood,
rocking rocking chair
women cackles and coughing.
It goes on like this,
from the things I remember
to the parts I make up,
fill in like so much putty,
weave into ropes to
tamp down the tents.

Why not?

Tomorrow is just more flowers, bodily pink and spiked green.
It is only more kneeling at gravesites,
more ashes to scatter.
We will take off and put back on
the funeral clothes.
We will set and clear the table
as we have for generations.
All the births
except your own
are behind us now,
a soul like a marble,
round and glistening in your pocket.

You squeeze it tight, the way I used to.
You check your pockets,
padding down.
Frantic.
Is it still there?
Is it still there?
Well, is it?

¡Salud!

2011-12-13T02:44:00.000-08:00

I spot them down the street before my husband.
Where? he asks
craning his neck a little until they appear,
like a magic trick between
the crowds of tourists and New Yorkers.
They’ve been in this country one week
and already, too much has happened.

We agree to drinks and set out. Salud. We clink glasses.
I ask how the day went.
It is so big, they tell me. Not like Madrid.
We build up and up and up
I tell them, pointing at the buildings
thinking of America’s need to reach something unreachable.

It is like a fucking movie, Oscar says. A fucking movie
a wide grin as he rolls his cigarette. I love it.
Me encanta, she says. We love it.

Later, we’ll put them in the car,
after hugging
and promising again maybe next year.
Maybe Rome?
Maybe Barcelona. Again next year?
We promise and we promise.

Write us, my husband says.
When you land so we know you are safe
and I watch him help her get her bags in the car.

We will miss you so fucking much, Oscar says.
We hug again and again.
They get in the car, doors shut. I have already helped
them put together the fifty dollars for the driver.
Tip, tip! Oscar says and I nod. Yes, tip.

The car pulls away and they turn and wave through the back window
Aida mimes a tear on her cheek and I brush at my own.
They wave frantically as the car heads down our street.
It is like a fucking movie.

We got back inside, clear up the beer bottles.
We sit on the green couch, in the thick silence of their absence.
My husband places a warm hand on my knee
and reaches down to fetch the wine bottle,
my hand already reaching for my glass.

Moon Prayer

2011-10-13T02:52:00.001-07:00

Yesterday
in that waned
or waxed time of night
on the long walk home
with the moon hidden
so hidden
in fact
it was just a smear
of white under more white
the way the sun can be at times
both blotted and blotting us out,

I said your name out loud
without expecting you to answer.

And for a moment I was more than less.
I could be that indifferent element
that charred wood,
that spark of flame,
that bubble of water,
that small breeze,
that rustles the back of a single leaf.
Or more, an atom
a muscle strained, unstrained,
strained again.
Something simpler.

Praise to the child king
and the walking stick.
Praise to the warrior girl,
the tallest trees,
praise to the mushroom,
the hot hot sand and the wettest sea,
praise to the next life,
praise to the train tracks and leaf blades
to the molecule splitting,
to the whale, floating weightless
praise to the moon.

Praised be.

What the Bridge Says

2011-09-12T03:23:00.001-07:00

They leave things behind,
junk and garbage sometimes,
but also books
the pages wrinkled with dried rain
and blotted with ink.

One time also a baby bird,
pulled too soon from its shells,
wingless
her eyes glistening now
with everything she doesn't see.

This is what they left behind on the bridge.

There was a bible once
and a ceramic Santa Claus. Marbles.
A box of baby clothes, moldy and stained.
Wishes are left here too, whispered from dry lips
falling from tear stained cheeks
tossed like coins down into the exhaust of the cars below.

If this is where we say hello, then also say goodbye.

On this bridge they leave love notes
and dog collars,
stenciled drawings
empty chip bags too but also
parts of his soul,
bits of her heart.

I have walked this bridge twice a day for four years
so I know that
I am leaving parts of myself on this bridge too,
so that maybe someone
else will see them,
and then we will know I was real.
These are the sacrifices we leave.
Cheap tokens of our existence
so that maybe we can have one more day,

of searching, of dreaming
of reaching through the wires
of love, yes, of fingers almost touching
but also one more day of hope.

Telling my Mother (at nineteen)

2011-09-09T03:32:00.000-07:00

We have all stood on this edge
and rowed out into dangerous waters.
First I promised myself and broke it,
then I promised my sister
and then there was no going back on it.

I stood in my room, having just returned from college,
awkward and limbless like an astronaut adjusting to gravity,
and she stood in the doorway,
her brow wrinkled in confusion
and frustration and anger, yes, anger too.

For a moment I saw myself as she saw me,
not the way I always see me,
distorted and warped,
sick,

but young, with unlined skin
and opportunities she never had,
I realized suddenly she wanted to grab me and shake me,
wake me from my own self destruction.

Scream, 'Waste', loud enough into my ear that not
only did my brain but maybe also my heart and my soul
buried deep in the swollen muscle of my trachea would hear it.

But she didn’t.
I told her, and she sighed deep and lost and
then for a moment inside, I was the mother,
asking Why? Why?
and she was the child, shrugging.

You will be okay, she said. You will get better.
It was not a question.

This is the way it happened. This was what we were waiting for.
Afterwards there was no going back to what once was.

Dying Cat

2011-09-02T03:29:00.000-07:00

She’s thin
and getting thinner.
I watch her wander to the table, rub up against it,
the sad concave of her sides.

I turn back to the cooking food,
pull out a piece of chicken,
crouch down,
coax her forward.

Eat, please, just eat.
Eat and let it stay.
Eat and stop the matting of your fur.

Eat and be better.
Eat and don’t be dying.
Because all I want is for you to be better.

She takes the food,
opens her mouth
pink tongue,
squeaks out a nearly soundless meow.

Like a thank you.
And I fall apart,
because I can’t save her,

I’m so afraid there is something I can do
and I’m not doing it. Something simple
something overlooked, something
like a miracle.

I can love her,
I can clean her and hold her
and pet her and hope but
I can’t save her

and it's killing me.

because she is old
and sick and
because she is dying,
but also
because she is one of my only friends on this awful planet.

What the Cicada Showed Me

2011-08-31T03:10:00.001-07:00

Because there was nowhere else to go,
I ran down the back staircase
after the rains came and went
and left nothing clean.

Outside there was a dead cicada,
its legs curled in like it was doing yoga,
the Child’s Pose,
its big segmented eyes
watching
but no longer watching a million versions
of my movement.

I watched it in its stillness
the way you watch a painting
searchingly,
not the way you watch the television
vacantly.

And its leg twitched slightly,
flexed and relaxed and flexed again
and I thought, my god,
it’s still alive and with a stick flipped it over.

I thought maybe it was just stuck
like a turtle, unable to turn on those wide wings.
I thought I could save it, still
the way I couldn’t save myself.

But then tons of small ants
crawled out, little red things
so tiny they needed a million to be seen
the way a mob works,
and then the cicada stopped twitching.

Then I knew the truth: There are things,
eating us from the inside out,
licking us clean till there is only a shell
and then after a hard wind
not even that.

I want to not be afraid.
I want to go back to the earth
fearlessly.

During the Hurricane

2011-08-30T03:16:00.001-07:00

During the hurricane, there were tornados
and just before, an earthquake.
Nothing major just a tremor,
a shudder in the sleep of a planet
suddenly chilled in deep space.

We wonder what next?
Locusts?
Plagues?
Has it been so long since the last
swath of disease, bounced lighter than air
down our throat, warping our blood,
changing our lives, permanently.

In the end, we flip the light to make sure.
We turn the handle on the faucet,
we flush the toilet.
We want to make sure that the life we lived
when we went to sleep
is still the life we wake to when night has passed,
when the hurricane has passed, tiptoeing through
lower Brooklyn,

leaving only a few downed trees,
like giants felled,
across the lawns of the very rich
and the very prosperous.

I tell you it could have been worse
and you nod and shrug,
kicking at fat twigs shaken loose
during the night of the hurricane, a night

when I slept, fitfully
my head on your chest,
dreaming of water,
too much black water,
and an octopus that wouldn’t let go.

This is how we pass the days, now,
stepping from one disaster to another, narrowly missing
true tragedy but I wonder how much longer can we go on?
How much longer, my friends, can we last?

Hospital

2011-08-24T04:40:00.000-07:00

These are the people who tend to the healing,
my mother says, the mending and setting of bones,
the cuts, sutures, fingers in rubber,
thread through skin
plaster and metal against muscle and wet organ.

This is the land of recreation,
of doctor’s plates and metal tables.
This is where we wait and wait, 1983.

But at only six years old this too
is the land of under-chairs,
of shoelaces
of finger-counting, alphabets and books.
This is the land of the beep beep beep machines
of funny nose-tickling smells,
of pretending penny-farthings,
of the inside outside upside
of dreams and naps
summer-drying up

of tears and more tears and what high
tall tables and what hard bread.

where all things are made and unmade
and remade again,
what shiny tools,
what clean floors,
what time-travel
space ship dimension
naturally, a family
but still no because
what lips
of my mother shushing, shushing me
pressing my head to her leg
hold still, hot hand to cheek
what tall
what lips thin line of the nurse
saying words that are just letters
strung together,
and she says
the man with the funny smell is dead,
we’re sorry,
but he’s gone.

Lullaby Girl

2011-08-23T03:41:00.000-07:00

- for Anneliese Helen

We do not hear the phone ring
over the noise of Manhattan
so we did not know
yet
that you were born,

that you have already
been held,
warmth and light
and kissed,
soft and gentle.

That you had changed
those people,
from husband to father
from wife to mother

That you have already
stretched two hands
two feet
toward the light
on these bare and bold first hours.

Already you have dreamed
as your parents have been dreaming,
fluttering eyelids and wonder.

Later there will be home,
and later still, growing
and someday you will read
these words yourself.
You will race and tumble and
grow bolder and braver.
Someday you will board a train,
cross an ocean,
see the world,
and then come back to us with a suitcase full of stories.

But that is later,
that is what will come,
here, it is quiet,
hush now
here, there is just this,
the strong thrum of your heart
hands waiting to hold,
night in New Hampshire.

Sleep, little love.
It is Midnight,
and all is well.

To Live

2011-08-02T02:55:00.000-07:00

If there are people dying
then there are always people to write about the dying
to lift the shovels and dig for the dying
to preach about the dying.

Even now
there is my grandmother
gone four years
and I raise a glass on the couch
to Joan,
and think four years, my god,

what have I done?

This is how we keep track of the dying,
by what we have or haven’t done
in the time they have been gone
as if that adds time to our own old clocks.

So Joan, here’s what I have done:
I have paced hard floors with dry cracked feet,
I have written
small things at night in secret.
I have been to Europe and fallen in love
with sad girls on Spanish street corners,
with the whores on Grand Via
with the waiters at La Rotunde
with the bard’s grave and church stones.

Joan, I have fallen in love.

And I have tried, so very hard
to breath each day,
to make tea,
to catch a sunrise in Brooklyn,
just to live, Joan.
To live.

Forty Four

2011-07-19T03:55:00.001-07:00

Today you would have been forty four,
with all the complications
and beauty of forty four
this double digit life.
I wonder
what you would have looked like
if you would have had another child
how much you would have hated these wars,
but loved your birthday,
and seafood,
and surprisingly early autumns.

But no,
instead you are gone,
like you were
ten years ago,
a stone left behind,
a carved name,
to remind us
as if anyone could forget.

These Days are the Days of Long Wanting

2011-07-10T07:52:00.001-07:00

These days are the days of long
wanting, of shade-less stretches
down Lexington Ave, of swirling
blue and green and flat trees you can touch
only maybe.

These days are the days of nowhere road,
going nowhere, coming from nowhere,
entering the part of you that is still
nowhere and unseen and hidden.

These days are the days of the dying,
of the lifeless tubed rattle breaths,
of the choked hysteria, of the bed
with just a key in the tenement over Third.

These days are the days of living,
of heat and saliva, of ocean water
salty foam, boys in shorts, with hairless chests,
of kissing and finger twirling, ache and spasm,
the ripping seer, the bold woman, naked
with the light on.

These days are days of movement refined,
of packing for California, of bent backs arching
and the curve of deepest knee,
of leaving and staying and going and remaining,
of paint and text on paper and pencil marks,
and new poets who are old poets, their bodies
already wracked and broken underground with the rat kings.

These days are days of you, twisted glass scars,
cold glasses of beer that you hope come and keep coming,
of movies, of Spanish lilting phrases and songs, the
chatter of fast moving tongues and cold bedroom sheets
eager for calves and heels and feet.

And these days are the days of me, too,
and perfect pancakes and hardwood chairs,
of old hips and myself, turning ever so slight
to the left, a new light, to be a person you thought
you have never seen.

Garage Sale

2011-06-27T03:13:00.001-07:00

They start out small, nervous with detail,
labeling with a felt tip marker
the price on each little china plate.
The ink bleeds and floats like a plant root
digging through so much soil paper,
spirals
like a seashell
a sensation.
What a memory,
this life,

What agony,
what history laid out on the cheap
plastic tables.
No one wants this, he says,
lowball offers on someone else’s
memories. Save your money,
he yells to the woman with the felt tip.
This is overconsumption.

A breath between

the things that we want
and the things that we fear we need.

A breath we think might save our lives.

I lift the doll from the table.
Trace a finger over her pursed lips
her plastic needles form eyelashes,
half missing,
lost somewhere in the backyard,
her chipped finger
un-stichable body tufts of grey wiry cotton loose.
What desperation
what soft hands,
Tilted her back,
so often
wordlessly
cheap plastic pursed lips,
one eye closes
one stays open
staring right up into the sun.

Inside the Waiting House

2011-06-15T03:20:00.000-07:00

Somewhere inside me there is a house,
with the windows thrown open.
The floorboards are split where the roots
have come through.
And both the sunlight
and the moonlight
make their home here together.
They do not argue
or vie for attention.
They bow and wend up the stairs,
polite,
with bent heads
and gentle words.

There is music playing
softly
something on violin
and it wavers in the air
like a memory
just about to surface.
There are also mice
and bent blades of grass,
there are flowers,
dew to drink.

But also
and most importantly,
inside this house
there is you and I,
untouched
by everything that is happening
outside
where I am lost miles from you
and you are thirsty
with the straw bent in the water,
slowly
too slowly
dying.

Inside this house
is the night that I made up,
the day that I pretend,
the you I didn’t know,
and the me I should have been.
I remember the day you almost died but didn’t
and the feeling that came with that.
I thought it would last longer.
Longer than this night, at least.

Inside me there is a house,
and we wait.
We touch, lightly
and we wait.
We do not speak
and we wait.
And I want this house
to be real,
the way the song is real
the way your voice
used to be real, higher than mine, thicker.
The way
I am still painfully real.

Dreams

2011-06-07T03:09:00.001-07:00

I am collecting memories
like souvenirs from a recently dead man’s room.
I will take the chair, the lamp,
the baseball t-shirt
and the trip to Madrid.

You can have the sweater,
the shoes, and our time in Paris.

I take the ballpoint pen,
the one that doesn’t scratch the paper
because I believe in the tools.
I will take the memories of the funeral
You will take the pencil
and the birthday cards
your mother’s letters to your father.

We are scavengers now, crawling
through the landscape of a life,
crawling over our own history,
trying to keep what we can.

You pile things on your back.
Steady.
Steady.
I reach for the tickets to our first play.

Leave it,
you say. You pull at my hand
Leave it. We’ll come back.

Here is the story:
Your life is a molecule,
stretched over a vast space
and time
the way the river runs down to bigger water
always bigger.
You need to know this.
There is so much the body cannot contain,
so much it cannot carry.

That is the life inside you. That is the real you.

Men and Women

2011-06-06T03:15:00.001-07:00

In the film,
the handsome man
tells the beautiful woman
“I can never have a real conversation with you.
You never have ideas only feelings.”

And I wonder if this is a truth for woman as a whole.
The woman tells him that feelings have ideas inside them,
that you have to dig, unfold, peel back the layers
like dresses slipping from the shoulder and dropping to the floor,
like lips opening, above and below
those feelings and behind them the ideas.

Are we always like that?
Earlier today the famous writer said
no woman were his equal. There
were woman writers,
yes,
but not his equal.
They put his words in the paper
so we know they are true.

And I realized for the first time, maybe ever,
that I have no more words for those arguments,
words that I used to have so many of,
words that spilled out between these open
lips and infuriated boys who thought they were men.
Boys who just wanted me to play nice
and get along with the other girls.

Words for women who told me,
it wouldn’t matter because one day
I would have a baby. And nothing would matter more than that.

Now I am old,
grown,
and wordless.
I no longer argue the how and why of
men and women
these dark and lonely stars stretched
across a soulless night.
I no longer argue the art.
Now I only have the energy,
to rise from the table, cross
the dark room, weave between the waitresses
and ask the bartender
if we could have another bottle
of red wine,
yes another bottle, please
even so long
after we finished our dinner,
just tonight,
just one more bottle of red wine,
like this is Paris
and not Brooklyn.

Es Mi Culpa

2011-05-26T08:13:00.000-07:00

It is 10:00 in the morning in New York
But my watch says 4:00 in the afternoon
because it is 4:00 in Madrid.

This is my fault,
I know that,
trying to carve something
out of nothing,
trying to keep some part of it with me
because back here,
all the news is bad and
there are moneylenders
inside our temples.

The sun in Madrid doesn’t set
till 10 or even sometimes later,
when we waited at Finnegan’s.
Where the bartender told my friend
that my husband
has a good kind face.

I think it must be easier to fall in love
in Madrid, with it’s language and it’s laugh,
with the way she tosses her hair and says
excuse me and goodbye.
She hates Picasso and for that,
I love her with her sunglasses and her beer mug.

Maybe it is just that there is more time,
in Madrid, more time to sit and talk and be told
We are not Americans. More time to make them understand
why the poor choose leaders that abandon them.
Why the poor believe the lie. More time
to teach them dirty words in English and
learn them in Spanish.

Maybe time is slower there, a lazy winding river
so that when he pulls the waiter aside and
orders more beer,
we are saving second, minutes
we are keeping them in our pockets
we are storing them under our tongues.

And the days are not doorways
we pass through blindly,
they are things we eat and keep
and carry with us, onto that plane,
and over that ocean.
It is 4:00 pm in Madrid,
the sun is high
and it will stay that way
because I know that at 10
or even later
that sunset, better than any sunset
I have seen over Staten Island,
that sunset in Madrid,
will break your heart.

The Flight to Madrid

2011-05-25T02:44:00.001-07:00

This is the life we have written.
We chose carefully, drawing second by second,
as we move through the airport,
our luggage in hand,
our eye on the clock.

We stop for beers
and food. And then another beer.

We walk down the ramp,
our ticket scanned,
the flight attendant says
hello, with a wide smile
but she doesn’t look at us,
as we inch
slowly
though
tight
aisles

and sit down, prepared for this journey.
This is the life we have written together.
The buckle snapped,
my water and journal with me.
We line up, the plane rolling for so long
I wonder aloud, are we driving there?
You smile, and take my hand

and then the worst part,
the speed and wobble and pressure
and I think to myself
most accidents happen during takeoff or landing
and then I try not to think about that.

This is the life we have written
and I say to no particular god
if it is going to happen, please
let it happen on the way home,
after I have already laid a hand on
the crumbling stone of an ancient church

after I have already tasted and drank
and kissed.
After I have laughed and talked for hours
with old friends, now real.
After I have already watched from
the train window that city leave me
and the country find me
after I have already climbed those stairs
and fallen into bed exhausted.
If it is going to happen,
let it be after,
I pray
to no particular god.
And no particular god
doesn’t answer
but later there is a hot sunrise
over so much blue ocean,
that I don’t care anymore
about anything else.
This is the life we have written.
What will happen next?

Saying Goodbye

2011-05-24T03:13:00.003-07:00

Christ, he said, I’m so sad.
So very sad.

And he’s right,
there will be no more
toasts, no more sitting
on the little hard stools
of Finnegans, his favorite
Irish pub in Madrid,
no more “What did you do today?”
as we tell him about
seeing Guernica
and the dibujos
madre con hijo muerto
and the one with horse,
his tongue like a dagger,

or when we went to Toledo
and told him about the winding streets
that belonged to el Greco,
how we got lost even with a map,
but found a little cerverceria and had a caña

or when we tried albondigas and drank wine
back at Cerverceria Alemana
where just days before we had all
sat outside,
our skin getting redder, our laughter getting louder
as Oscar grabbed the waiter and ordered another round.

Christ, I’m so sad, he says again, shaking his head.
I hug him and don’t want to let go.
This is goodbye.
Keep writing, he says, pointing at us,
before he walks through the gate
of the Biblioteca Nacional.
I watch him through the iron bars, his shoulders slumped,
his head down and think,
this can’t be it, this can’t be the end
before running down the sidewalk to the next gate,
and calling his name,
Oscar!
Oscar!
He looks up, a small sad smile,
Adios, I yell,
waving frantically,
because I don’t have any other words
Adios!
Adios!
because the ocean is about to stretch between us
Adios my friend.
Adios!

Literature

2011-05-23T03:03:00.001-07:00

-for Aida

She asks me to say the word again,
watching the way my tongue touches
the back of my teeth and then the pucker of lips
the open sigh, then the kiss again.

Lit-er-a-ture.

It’s my favorite English word,
she tells me, tucking her hair behind her ear.

It is late in Madrid, but still
early enough for more drinks.
We are standing on the street corner
as her boyfriend rolls a cigarette
ducks his head down to light it.

I love that word, she says again
and I think how much I love the word
love when she says it, the heavy A sound
as if here, on this side of the ocean, love is stronger,
something that will take hold of you
and drag you down.

Yes, let’s go, her boyfriend says, his teeth holding down
the thin paper cigarette and we cross
the street, weaving our way through the warm night.
I reach back,
taking my husband’s hand in mine.

Overhead there is a plane,
and I try not to think of the people,
seated in the little seats,
reading or sleeping,
covered in red blankets, their heads tilted
to the side,
so high above us,
that we four, on this street,
are only fiction to them,
only temporary
because I want this night
and this week
and these stories we have shared to last
much longer than I know they will.

Being Alive

2011-05-10T03:26:00.001-07:00

This right here,
this is
everything I know about being alive.

You stack dishes, like luggage,
you lock doors,
you lean against them,
push
push to make sure they are closed.

One day your friend will die,
and it will leave you sad and weary
with thousands of tears still inside.

One day you will realize you never
got what you wanted

or you will get it
and that could be worse.

This is everything I know about being alive.

You will walk through Monday to Tuesday
and then it will happen again.
You will dream – those long late night dreams where the egg is in your hands
and the ocean spreads before you separating you from the land and you wait
on this little raft knowing the water is safe but you don’t climb in.

You will fight and talk,
you will hold hands and remember the hand of the man
you held 20 years ago
and then you will stop thinking of that.
You will remember the days that passed
and then try to forget them.

If you are lucky you will see another country,
or create something.
And then you will sit in the chapel,
waiting, your hands together,
waiting. The casket up front will shine, just a little.

This is everything I know about being alive.
Tomorrow I’ll tell everything I know about living.

Sir Guillotine Give You a Painless Death

2011-05-04T02:40:00.000-07:00

When they tipped the basket of heads,
collected at the base of the guillotine
and they tumbled forth like the
awkward unsteady steps of a toddler,
the eyes moved,
teeth bit,
and chewed at the weave of the basket
one, they say, bit down on another’s ear
and wouldn’t let go.
Two men, their hands strong,
were unable to separate them.
Faces twisted in agony,
their tongues swelling and greying
from the tip back.

They also say they still reacted a day later
when they were dumped in the lime
far from the bodies
they had once so intimately known,
fingers and toes unmoving
the body dead
but the head still alive somehow
lips pursing,
eyes closing and opening
still waiting
waiting
watching for death.

These are the things we do,
these horrors and pains that we do
and then history re-writes.
We lay by our loves at night
slow breathing and pray
our lips pursing
eyes closing and opening
not me.
Not you.

Bloody Ocean

2011-05-03T03:36:00.001-07:00

It comes in buckets.
It comes in rainfall
dotting the sidewalk.

It comes in the tide,
the blood in the ocean.

It comes out of the faucet,
the tap,
out of the drinking fountains.

Our fingers and faces,
and also
their fingers and faces
stained pink
and red, the color of the desert sky
the color of the sun setting
over this broken city,
the color of starvation and hate
the color of the blood on the cross
in every clapboard church
in this country
and every temple in that
and every mosque in theirs,

and here
now
again
dropping
one more body
into the ocean,

like
a stone
down
a well
that
has
no
bottom.

Turning Thirty Four

2011-05-02T03:14:00.001-07:00

There is food in the pan,
simmering,
and the smell fills the house,
making my stomach growl.

I walk barefoot
one foot in front of the other
down the hardwood floors

from the kitchen
to the living room
with you

and we remove clothes,
my mouth finding yours
our palms
come together
and apart

and together again.

The soul
tells a story
that no one sees,
the tale of
these two people

over time stretched like an equation
carried from point A to point B

Point A when I was only twenty,
an abstract thing and now

thirty four

the skin freckling, the arch of the foot,
growing flat.

Two people

Yes, over time.

The Book of the Dead

2011-04-26T02:56:00.000-07:00

In my dream
the crocodile ate my heart,
right off the giant scale,
just like the Egyptians said he would.
I watched his scissor teeth,
jagged and miniature, thousands of them
slice through the meat of me,
his mouth filled with my blood.
He ate my heart and inside me, now
a beetle, it’s twitchy feathered limbs tickling my skin.

This was the bitter end.
The feather, the scale,
this was not going to hell,
in the Book of the Dead,
this was the vanishing.
No redemption, only the horror
of ceasing to be.

But this was all symbolic
as the Egyptians knew
and you know
and I know and I woke
with the steady thrumming in my chest,

and the knowledge of this:

Your life is happening again,
You shall emerge each day
and return each evening,
the sunlight on your chest
and later,
a lamp lit at night for your guide.
You will be told,
Welcome, welcome
to the house of the living.

Orpheus

2011-04-20T03:30:00.001-07:00

I can barely hear the piano
the tinny plink plink of notes
wafting out of the radio.

Notes dropping the way
people drop, plink, plink,
into the plastic seats on the bus,

their faces swollen as if slapped,
by the winds near the estuary,
their hands brittle, clinging to the
pole, going where?

Going home?
Is this what we have all been waiting for?
Our hands folded, our heads down,
our lives comprised of packed lunches
of cheese and mustard sandwiches,
of bottles that have been
or will been
or should be opened?

This is the quiet between the death spaces.
This is the quiet between the birth pangs.

There is music on this bus
that huffs and chugs it’s
tired way down 86th street
in the new rain
that washes the silt and mud
and beer cans down the city street

and I wonder
what song is it,
tonight,
on such a moonless, starless night
on a stark unholy, un-kissed night,
what song is it
that will save our lives?

Photograph

2011-04-15T04:44:00.000-07:00

-they say young is good and old is fine and truth is cool
but all that matters is you have your good times.
-Seth Avett

I was shown a photograph recently
of myself when I was younger,

and you were in it too,
and I was shocked at first

seeing the vacant look in my eyes,
the slack mouth, the cigarette dangling between my fingers.

Who is that girl?

How could it be that we stood at that
place and said those things
and been those people?

But then I remembered that
was when I was young.
And being young is different,
leaner.
Things moved quicker
with a death-defying ease,
when you could run full tilt
straight off a rooftop
and land on the ground
one step,
two steps,
and shrug and walk away.

Now, older,
I am just thankful
for all the things I can’t remember
that I might have done,
or said,
or been,
back then,
all the things I’m not doing
or saying or being now
and I remind myself
while I tie my shoes and head outside
to not look at photographs anymore.

Summer Lake, Late Nineties

2011-04-06T03:43:00.000-07:00

-for Maureen

It was not the trees or the light
or the sound of the leaves underfoot.

It was not the lake
or the moon or the joints we had smoked.

It was not the child’s swing set
or the giggle of girls when their bras were undone.

It was not the sound of sex
the hush and need of desperate release.

It was the simple conversation we had
of all the things we were going to do
and be before we even were anything.
It was the slow creak of the swings,
the hushed voice
or the occasional braying cackle
that split the night and betrayed our hiding spot
that let me know,
in a way you usually don’t ever get to know
that we were there,
in that moment,
and we were young
so very very young
even though we pretended we were old
so young that we could still hear the
steady thrumming of our hearts,
the shiver of bones that stretched
in skin tightened by the lake.
so horribly breakable young
that some of us will stay that way,
Too young to really realize that
this time was mercifully
not going to last.

Baseball

2011-04-05T03:37:00.000-07:00

Last night we watched baseball,
after dinner,
a drink in our hands,
our mouths tired now,
from all the talking,
our minds tired now,
our souls, quiet, for now.

The grass on television looks ultra green
and the white of the uniforms
snap like clean laundry.
This is spring coming,
I tell myself, watching the fan on the floor whirl.

The window is open,
and the faint trace of smoke
and the slow steps of the old man
making his way up the street,
tell me again, this is spring.

There is a homerun and we cheer.
We talk about going to see some games this summer,
about maybe my old father and my old mother coming too.
We talk about Coney Island,
and you squeeze my hand as if to say,
yes we have survived this long winter.
Yes it is spring.

And I watch you watch the game
and think about how it is almost your birthday
and I’m so glad we had this year together.

One more year together.

And I turn back to the game and watch the pitcher
hurl the perfect final pitch
and paint the black like Picasso.

Life Lessons

2011-03-30T03:01:00.000-07:00

Everyone wants life to speak with special kindness
to open its pink mouth,
and offer up a little kiss,
little touch,
little salve
some mark of separation and absolution.

But that isn’t the way it happens.
Accidents by nature are always happening,
over and over,
the squeal the burnt rubber,
the separation of cells,
the separation of skin from soul,
of this world and that.

And we carry that with us,
on constant repeat,
even ten years later.

Even then. Tragedy can be defining.
Or maybe we just want it to be, pulling up our shirt to show our scars
even after the hot white blaze of shock has washed out most of the true memory.

Everyone wants life to speak with special kindness
so that when it comes down to saving her or you,
it will be you,
at least you pray,
please god,
please let it be me.

City

2011-03-11T03:02:00.001-08:00

When I was a child,
back in that small town,
with crickets and bats
and all the other things that small towns have
I would wake at night

just to sit in the quiet of the living room.
I would worry about someone
or something, a snake maybe, being in the
basement, or the garage

but I would be too afraid to go see.

It’s like that now, too
watching myself roam
from room to room,
in this little apartment,

wondering how we fit
our whole life in here,
each day
without the walls bursting,
without the windows smashing
without the water
flooding into the street.
How have we not run out of air?
Packed on the buses and the trains,
I wonder still
how we can even stand to touch each other
even accidentally.

Tiny Revolution

2011-03-07T03:03:00.001-08:00

In the dream I had last night,
you appeared in the hallway of my old house.

We had not spoken in a year,
just as we have not spoken in a year
in this life.

And I was so thankful to see you.
Relieved, like when you can exhale
after holding your breath for too long.

And I told you that you should have
called and why didn’t you call

but you didn’t speak, as if there was some law against it.

And then later we pulled back my childhood bed,
moved it away from the wall
and there was a fire under it,

just a little smoldering thing,
hot coals like cherries
ready to pop

but also broken doll heads,
finger bones,
dead dogs,
broken glass jars
filled with dying plants,
rabbit fur
bent rusted nails
split wood,
Venus fly traps,
church pamphlets
seashells,
toy guns
a mason jar of dirty water
pens and paper and ink and paint
and hot wet melting crayons

and right then I knew it was a dream
and that in just a moment from now,
I will wake, and we will still be in the midst of this tiny revolution.

Don't Try

2011-02-28T03:15:00.000-08:00

They keep trying,
one after another,
lining up like some lottery
to hand out bad news,
like a diagnosis of rotten blood
they want me to know they don’t care
about what I care about.
They don’t consider it.
The rest of the world,
they tell me,
doesn’t care either.
There’s no point in waiting,
they tell me, nothing is going to change

And that’s fine,

cause I’ve got a pocketful of rejections here
and a whole lot of time.
I’ve got some classical music on the radio
I’ve got a stack of library books,
paper and pens
a window to the past when the line
was easier to follow.
I’ve got stretched canvas and a scissor
to cut open eleven year old paints.
And that has always been all I have ever needed.
And sometimes not even that, sometimes I need less
sometimes just sleep
your arm around me
and sometimes,
sometimes
nothing
at
all.

Big Bad Wolf

2011-02-22T03:02:00.001-08:00

We can hear the wind howling up the street
rattling our windows and doors
like the Big Bad Wolf come to life.

There are things we should do,
I know that. Things that need to be bought,
food, for one,
to fill the cabinets,
sick cats to care for.

There are great books to read,
writing to get done,
novels to finish or un-finish,
newspapers to read and discuss
journals to catch up on.

The wind is howling down our street,
rattling our windows and doors
like the Big Bad Wolf come to life.

But I’ve got a stack of movies,
Woody Allen mostly,
sitting here.
I’ve got a bottle of wine on the counter,
and another unopened.
I’ve got the classical station sailing out of the radio,
a nice number, Sibelius, I think.

The wind is howling down our street,
rattling our windows and doors
like the Big Bad Wolf come to life.

And I need new shoes,
boots that don’t leak in the snow that will come.
Presents for people,
bills to be written out and mailed
poems to be written down and lost,
wine to be had.
Books to be read, dog-eared, underlined,
quotes to be copies into journals,
genius to be found between the couch cushions.

The wind is howling down our street
rattling our windows and doors
like the Big Bad Wolf come to life,

and I hear you in the kitchen,
the drawer sliding open
the sound of the opener,
the pop of the synthetic cork.

You come back in with glasses in one hand
the bottle in another.
“Let it go, baby,” you say.
“We’ve got three days off.”

I think you are right.
So Sibelius and poetry and Woody Allen
and shopping and food, new boots
all of it will have to wait,
as we sit
quietly
my hand resting on your thigh
and listen
to the Big Bad Wolf blow
and blow
and blow.

Bandaids

2011-02-21T04:40:00.000-08:00

What age is it,
I ask him sitting at the bar,
my fingers ripping the paper open
and pulling out the bandaid,
sucking the blood off my finger,

What age is it, that you finally become
the kind of person who has bandaids there
and ready just in case you cut yourself?

Who are those people
and how do they pull it off?
I ask wrapping it around my bloody fingertip
and throwing the wrapper back in the shopping bag.

Who are these people? How do they manage?

People with kids, he offers.
And maybe that is true. Maybe once you have a child
you live in a space where anticipation is air and necessary.
You have to be ready for any little thing.

I have no bandaids at home.
When I slice my finger on your razor, I have no bandaids.
No Maalox on the shelf for stomach ache.
We must put on hats and coats and trudge out into the world
hot churning stomach and all.
No extra package of tin foil
when the current one runs out
mostly
but not completely covering the leftover pizza.

My life is fits and starts,
epileptic and sleepless, wrapped tight in the sheets.
I do not have any bandaids,
or an extra jar of sauce if we want to change up dinner.
I do not have napkin rings,
fresh arugula,
or extra pillows.
I do not have a spare bedroom,
or a variety of coffee,
candy or tea.
I do not have enough tissues.

But I do have all of Beethoven’s symphonies
as well as Dvorak’s. I have a new set of Proust,
and stacks of books on the floor
(because I do not have enough shelf space)
I have a box of oil paints,
3 beers in the fridge
a bottle of cheap scotch
and some empty canvases
which also,
catch blood, quite well.

Motherless

2011-02-16T02:54:00.001-08:00

If you ever ask me about your mother
I’m not really sure what I can tell you.

Maybe the sound of her voice.
Or the way she tilted her head when she smiled.

I have some letters to show you.

That might be it.
Also you look just like her.

Your father can tell you about the pain.
About it coming in waves and her
bobbing on the surface, rising and falling
and still rising again. A thing adrift on an endless sea.

He can tell you about the late nights
and the pills lined up like soldiers,
and about how in the end,
he just wanted it to be over
even if over was death

and then it was,
and he went home
and you were only two
on the floor, wide eyed
already downy haired and motherless.

Because This Country Isn't Getting Better

2011-02-15T02:50:00.001-08:00

I want to move to Manhattan,
to a big wide loft,
with a freight elevator.

and hear my steps echo over the floor
count them and it will take more than five
to cross the room.

I want to move to Manhattan
and care for the sick and the lame,
bring them armfuls of white and pink flowers

and clean up after them. Tell them, what
a nice day it is outside
and open windows.

I want to move to Manhattan,
and have a car so that I can
drive all the way up Riverside Drive
without hitting a single light.

I want to move to Manhattan
and meet friends in Central Park.
Or sit on the bench, alone, but happy.
I want my parents to come down and stay in the spare bedroom.

In the morning we could get coffee and bagels
at the shop on the corner and there will always be empty seats.

I want to move to Manhattan
so that when you are sitting with me
on the couch in Brooklyn

and you say, we should move to Manhattan,
it will already be done.
Then the loss will be over, the hard part,
we would have pulled it off, somehow, just keeping
our heads above water in this winter.
Really I just want to know how it ends.

I want to move to Manhattan. Or, even, Paris.
Yes Paris. That would work too.

Saturday Morning

2011-02-14T02:43:00.000-08:00

Tangled sheets,
which seem to take forever to get unwrapped,
and I feel you pull me,
like a toy,
like a young, light thing,
towards you
and I’m surprised we have slept so long
so late
in this bed,
that we have had now for years,
the way we have had each other for years,
and for so long and so late
and I never ever get tired
of finding your mouth
and how each kiss feels
so very much like the first,
all dizzy and lightheaded
my hair covering your face,
and love,
I never knew.
I wanted it to be true,
the things they say about what love could be like,
and it’s true,
oh it’s so true.

Two Girls

2011-02-07T04:46:00.001-08:00

We spent so much time in that basement,
sitting in those bar stools,
playing grown up.

So much time, watching television,
sleeping over, kissing goodnight
she would slip closer to me, her arm draped down my leg
and we would lay like that all night
and never speak of it in the morning,

because in the morning we would talk about
the boys we loved who loved us back
with abandon. We called them and they came over,
all hot confidence and wet teeth.

Her parents were never home,
so we had all we needed,
cheese sandwiches from the fridge,
vodka boosted from behind the bar.

We can live like this, I thought,
and nothing will ever change.
I will keep my little red car parked in front of this house.
I will never go away to college
and leave you, I nearly whispered into her hair one night.
And your sister will never die and shatter your family
and shatter what was left of us.
We can stay like this, right now.
The way we are when we are young,
still growing together and apart,
the days stretching straight into the sun
with no end or sadness in sight.
I promise.

The Spaces for Silence

2011-02-01T03:03:00.000-08:00

It was as if we stumbled
back through a doorway into the past,
the wine bottle next to the bed,
our feet

and hands and head resting, finally.
The music playing next to us,
and you said,

We’ve been listening to this woman sing
for 13 years.
and I said, Yes. What a good small thing
I thought, to lie here, still, after all those years,

our heads against our pillows,
our elbows just occasionally touching,
as if to keep us tethered to the this moment in time
to each other.

Outside the snow might have fallen
or it might have not. We were incapable of leaving this
bed, our raft, our little pink heart, floating out to sea.

“Don said everything changes. He said it was the one thing you always knew,” you said.
You are remembering something that hasn’t happened yet,
replaying it in your mind.
In that second you can feel yourself changing, your bones chipping, your hair lengthening.

“Don’s right,” I said.
And then we don’t speak, the woman still sings
and we still believe in the integrity of words spoken but also
the spaces for silence.

Angela

2011-01-27T05:50:00.000-08:00

I found your letter the other day,
stuffed in the box where we kept the wedding stuff
and old tax forms,
the things we group together,
the things that are deemed important and must not be lost.

There it was,
typed out like a little book of secrets.

It was old, from the first time I moved to this city,
when the streets were still too narrow
and the people too wide. When I felt each day
they were eating me alive.

Something had me in its mouth and was chewing.

You told me it’s okay to stop writing.
That it’s okay to stop taking ourselves so seriously.
You told me about the pure joy of domesticity,
a meal well made, a curtain sewn by hand.
You talked about the beauty of women’s work,
craft, and how we all had it wrong back in college
when we tried to be like men.
Tried to write the way men write.

I read your letter twice.
Then I stood at the window,
watching the snow coming down again and I cried
because you left and I never knew why.
Because the space you occupied was real inside me
and since then nothing has ever felt real again.

And it’s stayed that way,
when I see my friends now, I watch them talk and think
someday they will leave too. Like you did. They will just be gone.

We stood together in the woods, by the river when
you were married,
and I read your vows, helped to usher you into this strange new life,
not realizing that when you walked through that gate,
you wouldn’t come back.

Not fully. Not to me.

How the Family Happened

2011-01-25T03:33:00.000-08:00

There is no What Happened?
Like a question.
There is only Happened.
Like a series of facts.

It went like this:
There was a woman and a man
who became a mother and a father.
And then they weren’t.
Just like that.

And they had a girl who
was a daughter and then she wasn’t.

The not mother went away
and the not father went away
and the not daughter waited and waited.

This is the past and everything there is still
and two dimensional. It cannot change its stillness.
There will always be leaves on the trees
because this is July. These people are not people
they are pictures of people. Small cardboard cutouts
that no matter what they do they always follow the same path.
They cannot change it. That is the past.
For instance,
there will always be the not father getting into the car to leave.

And there will always be the moment
after the birth
when the girl who is not a daughter is taken from the hands
of the woman who is now, rendered, not a mother
with her not a mother milk in her breasts.
Later, not much but still, later
the man and the woman
who are no longer father and mother
will come back together to be husband and wife

and that is what the girl who is now
someone else’s daughter
will never forget.

They moved on,
together
without her.

Pen Pal

2011-01-24T03:19:00.000-08:00

I think you have a pen pal, he says,
when I get back in from the cold.
McCartney still singing through my headphones.

And he holds up the letter.
Another little card.

She tells me she plays flute too. Not just piano.
And about all the snow they got in Connecticut.
She thinks being a librarian is the coolest.
She tells me when her birthday is, as if I didn’t know.

I read it twice. Then I give it to my husband to read.
For a second I wonder if I’ll ever see her
before I remember the fine act of patience
my hopes like stones I have been laying each day
a path back to the sea
and how long it took to get here
these long ten years.
This time I don’t think about the dead,
except that I was close to her age when I got my first letter from her mother.
I still have it, that awkward introduction.
No, today is not for the dead, instead I think about the living girl

in her house, which I have never seen.
I picture her up in her room,
her posters,
her swimming medals,
the things she keeps on her dresser,
nail polish, the case for her glasses,
maybe a picture of her dog that died,
the drawer she keeps these cards in,
if she leaves her clothes on the floor like I still do,
her voice, high and clear, when she yells, “Coming”
because her parents called
and dinner is on the table.

Wake

2011-01-21T02:54:00.000-08:00

The dead do not occupy the space of our kid fears.
They are not in the dark woods,
or the abandoned house.
They are not in the murky and inky sea.

They do no leave us on battlefields,
or street corners
or on beaches.

That is where the living are.
The dead,
leave us in clean places.
Neatly stitched lines of tiny flowers
on the stiff fabric of couches
and the cool metal of hardback chairs.

They are here in this room where the air is pumped in,
under the slick shine of a casket reflecting soft light.
In the plush perfectly vacuumed carpeting.
Neat lines.
No lint.
Hushed voices.

The dead become another object in this room.

It is here that you feel the heat of your own skin
flushed and pumping,
the quiver of the heart in that stillness.
It is now that you feel the nerve of your existence
against all these unsoiled lines.

It is in these sanitary starched places that the dead,
pass through that gate and leave us
and we sit, stupidly
and we watch
and we wait.

The Car Accident, 1995

2011-01-20T05:20:00.000-08:00

Yes there was the scraping of metal
against asphalt
and the heavy low thunk of the Ford
lilting and tipping no longer bound to gravity
and then dropping with the combined weight
of all of our teenage futures,
but in stories I make it sound like it took so long

when in fact, it didn’t.
The car was turned over in a fraction of a second,
sooner than any of us even had time to think about

and in reality I turned my head
to see my first love,
twisted and hanging,
limp against his seatbelt
his long hair over his face,

unmoving.

and I thought how young he looked.
How young we all are.
How young and bent and over.

Then I crawled on all fours out the busted window
like a sinner
away from the wreckage before anyone could speak.

Walking to the Lake

2011-01-18T03:07:00.000-08:00

You said there was a giant tortoise in the lake at the bottom of the hill
and when we walked down there I use to peer over your head

just to see if I could see something
anything that might be close to what you said you saw.

I waited to see the round mottled shell crest the water,
like a prehistoric thing from another time. I wanted it so badly.

How was it you got to see? Always you.

Our mothers wrung their hands
watch the road, they said, their voices high and tight.

Other children had been killed there, on that
slick wet pavement down by the lake.

We stole someone’s boat. I know that now, but then
it belonged to us, to everyone in fact. We just chose to take it.

The oars dipping into the water, the boat turning round and round,
my eyes desperate to see a fin, a hooked beak, to find the creature.

Instead, we will find your dead dog on that same stretch.
After that, my father will be pulled over,

troubled by the cop for his accent, accused of drinking.
He will speak softly and politely, eyes wet and averted.

I will not see the turtle, not when I got my license,
nor on my wedding day,
nor on the way home from your father’s funeral.

But I will keep looking, even after we have separated,
like kids do, racing home, in the last seconds of light,
not looking back. Not once.

Real, right now

2011-01-17T05:36:00.000-08:00

The size of the kitchen grows and shrinks
attempting to fit us,
and all our new expectations.

I want to cook together,
you told me,
after an argument.
It was supposed to be a way to find
each other
after thirteen years.
I want to cook together, you said. Something new.
At first I was surprised,

and then I thought about the home,
how sad it could be,
carved by the hands of the last to leave,
the dust on the floorboards,
the books not put away,
the bed unmade,
space unoccupied.

And I understood the need to make something,
to be in this room,
the gentle tap of the knife on the cutting board,
the hiss from the oven when the sauce
boils over onto the coils.
The music of making,
a dance of making.
This could be the beginning of happiness.

To create, in each space,
and then to fill that space,
with flowers and books
the newspaper left on the floor.
objects to prove I am there,
I am still alive for now,
in this moment and it might all work out.
My disappointment shifted towards the dark.
Hope like a switch I can flick
late at night,
moving from room to room
and know it is all real.
Right now. If nothing else, there was this life.

The Art of Letter Writing

2011-01-11T03:09:00.001-08:00

There is still letter writing.
There is still the moment he enters the room,
his hand behind his back and says, “I’ve got something for you,”
a wide, nearly giddy, smile on his face,
and he gives it to me,
and I want to devour it,
her wide young script,
still so young,
and the stamp,
the seal of the envelope,
the way the paper splits,
around her return address
the card,
the smudged ink of her thank you,
her hope to see me sometime.

There is nothing like this.
And there is no way to talk about
how I know her, how I knew her mother,
but there is still this artifact,
that I tuck in my drawer, with the others

and think, immediacy is overrated.
Nothing beats waiting for it,
opening the tiny door of my mailbox,
like a door into her world,
and seeing that letter laying there.
Waiting after its long journey from her home to mine.

We haven’t lost that yet
in this world that we are changing too fast.
Soon maybe, in my lifetime,
but not yet,
like a piano solo, the soft depression
and release of keys,
the pen to paper,
the journey,
the proof.

Pillow Talk

2011-01-10T04:15:00.000-08:00

He’s telling me about his grandparents,
the ones on Denny Street in Lawrenceville,
how he used to go over there all the time
and how close he was to his grandmother.

I know this. I’ve heard and seen it. Seen it
on the mornings of the anniversary of her death and birth.
But watching him here, now,
laying in bed, over wine, after sex,

I think that it must be nice.
It must be nice to be able to stir up that emotion.

I think of my grandfather,
who died when I was six.

Things I remember:
his smell.
Now, I know it was beer, but then it was
just the scent of the only other man that came to our house.
That he ate mayonnaise sandwiches
and my mother wouldn’t let me have one

and that he wasn’t going to see my kindergarten music show,
so I sat on the floor of my kitchen,
drumsticks in hand
and I sang at the top of my lungs, about Indians and the Old West,
and I did the pussywillow rhyme,
and beat the sticks in rhythm on the
cheap linoleum of my parents kitchen,
knowing it sounded better with the whole class on the hardwood of the stage.

There will be the things I find out after,
the cruelties that family can do to each other,
his sickness,

but that is not the same, that is someone else’s telling.
These few moments,
these are the things that belong to me.
It was 1982. And he would be dead by the following year,
and this will be all that I carry after that.

Reading my Life

2011-01-07T04:19:00.001-08:00

I’m ready for something else.
For a second act.
Something new.

I’ve used up what I had in this life.
I’m ready to find myself
in a city I don’t know, amongst people who
don’t speak
or won’t speak my language.

I want to open my eyes and find
myself in a traffic jam. Up front
will be an accident. There will be sirens
and horror and I will watch myself experience it.
I will see the blood this time.

Or I want to open my eyes and be there
cutting across a field to another house.
There will be starlings and cardinals,
the birds of winter. The ones that stay.
And inside the house there will be another me,
telling another story,
about the first life. This one.
Before the start of the next one.

Like chapters
and the space between
being on the page and turning it.
Like the second before you remember
your old lover’s scent or laugh or sound.
At first they are lost to you and then they come back, hard and fast.
Their trembling hands, the rise and fall of their chest.

One day it will all be gone.
It leaves, and that space of memory waits to be filled with something else.

I’m ready.
Tell me,
when is it going to happen?

Sort of Easy to Die

2011-01-03T02:51:00.000-08:00

In the day to day, it seems harder
but out here, on the endless highway
that no one has plowed

miles still from home,
it seems sort of easy to die.

I watch the speedometer and then the cars
in the other lane slide into the guardrail.
I think about speed.

Just hours before we had been up in New Hampshire
for the holidays but one by one we all left.
We were last. Your brother kept talking out loud about the storm.

Now in this small space we are talking softly,
about water, which we didn’t have
and speed, we struggled to control
and snowdrifts that refused to move.
I tell you that we’ll be okay as long as there are no hills.

and I’m thinking this blizzard might be real after all.

When we get home, I will thank you for not killing us,
and we will laugh,
exhausted on the couch,
our hands still trembling from the clutching,
our hair still beaded with sweat,
the car outside an umoving thing,
rocking against the wind and snow that barrels up the street,
demanding to be heard.

Friendship

2010-12-16T03:13:00.000-08:00

She tells me
other people don’t understand,

leaning forward and then backwards in the chair,
as if there was not enough room
at this little table
in this little coffee shop
in Brooklyn.

Apartment living is different, she tells me.
We were talking about space, the tender occupation of space,

how a life is cobbled together out of plaster dust
and poorly applied paint

We are just wading through.
Mythbusting, she says with a laugh.

You have to take it, bite down on it to find the gold.
A deep and unwavering act of cherish.
There is something both savage and tender in the act.

And she is right,
when last night I stood in the living room
and saw how 13 years of love could morph
and change and become something you needed to catch

and pin down and hold against you
till it’s breathing steadied and
it’s mouth finally closing over long teeth and
the night was brought back
to us

quiet again but changed
a renewal of sorts,
with slight scorch marks
and the sharp whiff of incandescence

like a fire finally stamped out.

After the Accident

2010-12-14T02:59:00.000-08:00

Keep your eyes open, he tells me,
and I watch his through the rear view mirror. Small and squinted
like he’s always smiling even when he isn’t, like right now.

The car is moving faster now and I’m not sure where
I should put my hands because of the blood.

These are the things I worry about.
I try to tell him this but no words come out.

Keep your eyes open, he says again.
At least I think it was again. Maybe this was the first time.

I can smell the water on me, metallic
copper – like rust waiting to be born –

Tell me what happens in On The Waterfront, he says
but I have never seen that movie.

Suddenly I am afraid, because I can’t answer that question
and I can’t keep my eyes open. So I start making up a story.

I add characters and setting and dialogue
and I hear him laugh lightly – but then whimper – like a hit thing.

Okay, he says. Wizard of Oz. Tell me what happens.
And I smile, my eyelids dropping because I know this one
and I know we are only a few miles from the hospital

and if we can just get there, everything is going to be okay again.

The Day After the Anniversary of Your Death

2010-12-13T02:54:00.001-08:00

We walked through the freezing cold,
that blew up 75th street,
straight from the estuary
and through the fabric of our jackets,

your music blasting from
an ear bud one in each of our ears
the way young lovers do
not old lovers like we are now.

There was caterwauling
and I thought to myself,
we are going to wake up
all the old people on the street

because I can’t carry a tune.
You were doing great though, you always do,

but you weren’t worried about the others.
We always have to hear them, you remind me,

and besides, it was thirty years ago,
thirty years and one day
since Lennon was killed.

Tomorrow we’ll walk past the gates of the Dakota,
not really stopping by the guard,
but lingering just a bit to look down that driveway.
You will tell me that John asked to walk in. He stopped the driver.

There will be no singing tomorrow.
But tonight, we are still on this street,
with music in our ears
his music
and the hope of warmth
if we can ever make it out of this cold
and to the front door.

The Appointment

2010-12-06T04:28:00.000-08:00

Today is one of those days I have been dreading
because it all feels too personal.
His hands, slippery in rubber
up against my teeth filling my mouth
The metal or the pain, one of those, smelling hot
like a pot of soup left to burn on the range.

He will have me lay back in his chair,
his eye magnified like a bugs
through the lens so that I cannot bare

to look at them
blinking, huge.

I will be trapped and he will be in control.
That is the worst part isn’t it?

I will stare up at the light,
it’s sickly yellow hue.
There will be blood, and saliva,
mixed together,
filling my mouth.

If I can see it, in the reflection of his glasses,
I will think I am being punished.
This is how it will go.

There is too much work in the tending of the body,
and I don’t understand why I cannot just check out
sometimes, just float into another space,

of quiet
of silence
without thought and without the notion of the next thing
waiting to fall.

I will remember being younger and not being afraid
of this man with the metal and the needles
and the white mask over his face.
and how
incredibly
stupid and foolish children can be.

The Something

2010-11-29T09:10:00.000-08:00

In the museum is your favorite painting,
the Three Musicians. Right there, when you
turn the corner. I can see it.

The harlequin,
the pierrot
and the monk.

You like the colors, you tell me, the way the
blues and brown beat against each other.

I should be on my way there, right now,
to see it
alone.
You have already left.
My bag heavy with great books written by great men.

I have packed my journal, so that I can sit
in front of that painting, a great painting painted by a great man.
The reds and browns beating against each other
attracted and repealed over and over
so that I can sit and write,

something.

The museum, was something
to do today. To fill the hours.
But on the way I realized that the museum
was one more thing to do, one more something
I didn’t want to do.
One more something I didn’t want to see.

So instead I am home, having turned back at the train station.
The cats curl their tails
in little question marks when I open the door.

Later I will write and read and possibly
lay my head on your pillow
in the bedroom,
I will wait in the silence for a moment.
The murmur of the neighbors,
the car honks at the window,
the questioning purr of the cat.
It will be the moment before the something.
Before I get up and put in the laundry,
taking,
great comfort in these little things
done by us little people.

Commute

2010-11-15T02:54:00.000-08:00

When it come on, it startles me.
This realization of how many of us there are.

The subway car pulls up to the platform and I watch their
faces slide by, these people, who walk the same streets,
breathe the same air.

Their fingers touching the same metal poles,
and handrails, the same doors

Coming in. Coming out.

It is all of us, we alone.
I wonder what they are searching for

and I hope they wonder what I am searching for,
before the train clanks and heaves,

this vehicle of mankind.

The woman waits, pulling her hair out of her mouth,
the breeze underground can be strong.

She sighs and rubs her eyes.
I am you, I think as I pass her,

and we can trade lives. I can live inside your little world,
and with you pull poems
from your teeth.

You live inside a room I can’t imagine, and have never been to.
The moonlight probably falls on the floor there, long and elegant.

The woman on the platform leans toward the train,
leans the way one must lean into pain.

Keep it, and then give it away, like breath
and keep passing that way from one of us to another.

When the Dead Are the Dead

2010-11-10T03:35:00.000-08:00

He tells me when his father died
there was a great force,
and they felt him leave,

his body vacant now,
but it passed through all of them, first.

You were there? I ask, wide-eyed.
I’m gripping my chair
because I want so badly for it to be true.

My husband has told me the same. He talks about peace.
How his grandmother looked when she died,
or really
the moment after.
The moment when the dead are the dead.

My friend tells me he wasn’t there,
he didn’t make it to the hospital on time.
But his brother was, and his brother told him so.
He says it with such authority. I don’t ask.

It makes me think of my mother
when she found out her mother was dying.
And she moved from room to room alone,
the nurse speaking through the phone in her ear
saying

Come now.
Come now.

My mother knew she would never make it
and this woman, who filled this role as mother
who bore her into this world
would be ushered out alone.

My mother moved from room to room
alone, searching. Like a good thief in her own home.

Back at the bar, I listen to my friend speak.
I look between him and my husband.
They are sure. They know.
They have stood too close to death.
It has happened to them, without it happening to me.
I am still on this side.
Alone, searching.

Nicer

2010-11-09T02:51:00.000-08:00

It was the weekend after she died,
or maybe the weekend after that.

Everyone came back home even though my mother
had been clear there would be no funeral.

She didn’t want a funeral, my mother told me over the phone.
Okay, I said. I figure it’s probably a lot like my not wanting a birthday party
when I was younger, scared no one would come and then I would know.

My mother, to honor her dead mother, made all her favorite dishes.
Her ashes would be dumped in the ocean off of Florida where she lived for so long.
I was not invited. None of the grandchildren were.

Coordinating schedules is too hard, my mother says. It will just be your father and I.
And your uncle and his wife.
Okay, I said.

At dinner my mother talked about how hard it was sometimes.
She could be such an infuriating woman, my mother says about the dead.

And I remember being younger, my mother pulling me aside, telling
me to be nicer to this woman, this old woman I didn’t know. This strange presence in our house.

My mother pressed into my palm a little toy locket
To keep, she said, if you are nicer.

She was just unhappy, my sister said. She was never happy.
I know, my mother said. It was so infuriating.

And then she says, I wish I had more time. I think I wasted time being angry.

You should have been nicer to her, I said.

It just came out like a landslide of words
out of my mouth, past my teeth, floating out in the air.

My mother’s face crumples. She nods. She agrees.
I can’t bear to look at my sisters.
By then, it’s too late for me to take it back.

Last Stop

2010-11-03T03:20:00.000-07:00

Even when I change seats on the bus, he seems to be staring right at me.

I know him, his red nose, red cheeks, big leather hat.

In my job you get to know a lot of crazies.
He stands in the stairwell of the bus even though there is a sign
telling him not to stand in the stairwell when the bus is in motion.

The bus lurches to a halt, the breaks squealing
the people pushed forward against each other.

This is the next to last stop. I could get off here,
and walk the rest of the way. I usually do.

But I watch the man in the leather hat turn to leave.
I don’t want to get off the bus the same time as him. I don’t want to avoid him on the street too.

Right before the doors close, he climbs back on
and I think, this is it. It’s because I didn’t get off.

I believe these kinds of things, that I am visible instead of invisible.

He sort of falls, the man in the leather hat with his red red nose
and lays on the steps.

Hey, he yells. Hey!
The bus driver lifts his head in the rearview but you can’t see his eyes.

Hey! The man yells. Hey!
The busdriver says What.

The man says, Thanks! Thanks!
from the floor and then climbs back up and the doors close
and the bus wheezes forward. I watch the man in the leather hat limp down the street
his grey hair floating over his shoulders like an angel.

and I wish I got off at that stop.
The bus starts to turn and then stops at the corner,
shaking. Idle.
and I wish I got off at that stop because I know that going around the corner,
I will pass another year of my life here on this bus.
Waiting.

Test Results

2010-11-02T03:30:00.000-07:00

When the phone actually rings, we look at each other in surprise.
It is a foreign sound at first and then gradually, the connection is made
and surprise turns to disgust.

It is Friday night. We have a carved pumpkin in the window
and a classic on the television. It is two days before Halloween in the city.

Who is this? you say. Who is this?
Showing me the number.

I shrug and tell you to leave it.
And then I remember the way you remember a song
you haven’t heard in years. A song that belonged to a life you no longer live.

It’s my doctor. But by then, he’s already stopped calling.
You ask me why the doctor is calling so late.
You sound frustrated, tired, and now, a little scared.

I call the doctor back but he doesn’t answer.
He just leaves a message about calling him Monday.
His voice burns inside me.

I sit back down on the couch and we don’t speak for some time.
What’s wrong? you ask me.
It’s fine, you say. Doctor’s don’t call with bad news and then tell you
to call them back on Monday.

I nod. But I don’t believe you.

Already there is a division between us.
This experience, that will change us, has started.
You, as observer.
Me, as recipient.
This is what I think on Friday night.
Monday morning will be different, and I will laugh to myself
but also whisper a thank you, quickly, so no one sees
a breath of relief.

Still, right now there is nothing but the hours
from this moment, on the couch to Monday morning,

Hours I usually savor, beg for, kill for.
Hours that we have plans for, look forward to.
Hours that I now hate.

The Doctor

2010-10-29T07:14:00.001-07:00

He rolls my sleeve up,
his face dour and downcast.

He tells me all about his money problems.
How patients never pay on time
and how he’s always behind the bills

The worst thing I did, he tells me, is start my own practice.

He runs his hand through his hair
and then uses them to pull my shirt away
and slide the stethoscope across my chest.

He asks me what I do for a living
and I tell him.
He nods. That’s good, he says.
You’ll always have a job.

Which makes me laugh.

At least you aren’t a doctor, he tells me.
Big mistake.

He puts the needle in my arm
and I watch my blood fill the vile
slowly at first,
cautious,
and then gushing
so fast I think it will go everywhere,
fill this room, drown us both.

At the end of the appointment,
he puts out his hand and I take it.
He pulls me toward him, hugs me.
He holds on tight and says,
Take care of yourself. Please.

After, I think, what are we looking for?
What right do we have to be happy
after everything we have done
for
and with
and mostly, to each other?

Returning Your Things

2010-10-28T07:49:00.000-07:00

He told me I was terrible at washing dishes,
held the fork up towards the dirty window.
See the egg, he said showing me the residue
painted on the tines.

I had to rewash them all, he says.
I don’t say anything
because last night

he talked about his ex-girlfriend
for so long he started to cry.

He told me how they were going to get married
and she packed up one day
while he was in class
and disappeared.

He suspects it was Arizona she went to,
and tells me when we graduate, we can go there too.

He pulls me close to him at night
just to have something to push away in the morning.

Later, I will come by when he is in class.
And leave his t-shirt with this roommate.

He’s just messed up, the roommate tells me.
I nod and hand over his things, wanting
to be anywhere but in this dirty hallway.

The living room is filled with
the blue grey light of the television,
that most unnatural light,
and it casts the roommate in silhouette.

You should have said yes when I asked you out, he tells me,
taking the t-shirt.
I can make you happy, he says.
He takes my hand,
gently,
rubs the inside of my wrist,
like a beloved pet
and puts it on his hard cock,

Come inside, he says.
Please! and then my name,
And then,
please,
softer.

Power of Names

2010-10-27T02:49:00.000-07:00

There is too much power in names, I think.

There is a change the moment the word
shakes loose like a rainstorm,
from your mouth.

Like when I was young and out
past the neighbor’s yard
farther into the woods.

There was broken light and the smell of wet damp leaves.
Dan was there, and we did not tread lightly, he and
my sister and I. We stomped through wet leaves,
wet leaves that belonged to us the way the world
belongs to the very young.
We sang loud,
keeping the darkness at bay.

The snake was there, heavy
and slick half its body under leaves.
We formed a wide semi-circle
as if coming in for the kill.

Dan held a stick.

I remember my fear.
Is it dead, my sister said.
No, Dan answered.
And we knew, at that moment, it was true.

We had to go forward, a sort of
manifest destiny of our woodland ownership,
the snake lying prostrate through the path,
tempting and begging.
We argued over who would go first.

And then there it was, like a bell,
like a salvation, my mother’s voice,
crossing the distance between my home
and this creature, cutting a swath through the air.

The sound of my name.

And I turned and ran, free.
This is the power of names.

But it works the other way too,
when we are older and I call your name,
the word coming together, shaking itself from me.
As you cross the street you
look back for a second.
And I say it again, desperate
and you nod a little but
you keep walking.

These are the Things that Make a Nervous Breakdown

2010-10-26T03:27:00.001-07:00

When I spotted the fly on my ham and cheese sandwich,
it already had one foot in the mustard.
He or she, I’m not sure,
but I jumped and waved it away.

Then when I picked up my glass,
my mouth still forming the words,
and lifted the glass to my lips,
there it was,

floating and dead,
in all that pale lemonade.

I scooped it out with a spoon,
dumped the dead fly down the sink.

and then poured the rest of the lemonade after it.

What? you asked,
Nothing. I said.
Just another thing.
Just another thing that can ruin a meal.

I stand at the sink
and listen to myself breathe,
a whistle sound, faint but there,
trailing the inhale
and trailing the exhale.
Trailing again.

I look down at my unpainted toes,
and they stare back up at me, like ten strange eyes.
For a moment, I wonder who they belong to.
They seem too far away to be my own feet
and just like that everything starts to come undone.
It will take awhile. It won’t fully happen until much later that night.
But this is where it began.
When it ends,
if
it ends,
I will remember that.

Dear Hank

2010-10-25T02:37:00.000-07:00

I know we don’t talk much
and I tease my husband about you
and I hate that scene in the documentary
when you are so mean to Linda

But I just wanted to let you know,
the kids, they are still listening.
They still like your bluebird.
They read you online now,
they leave comments in 2010
about how much you mean to them.
See people don’t really talk these days,
everything is left online with horrible
spelling which, you might have liked, after all.
There are more little zines now, you
would have been an even bigger king now,
but still, what I’m saying is
they find you everywhere
and they too have a bluebird
like you had a bluebird
but they came too late
didn’t they?

All the same, I thought
you might like to know,
that even though
that typer has been quiet
for over a decade,
we still hear that whiny voice,
we still see those words.
It’s all still there,
right where you left it,
when you moved from
Hollywood and Western
down to San Pedro
to try to die in peace.

The Interview

2010-10-23T06:15:00.000-07:00

So both you and your husband get up at 5 o’clock in the morning? he says.
Yes.
And what do you do?
Write.
What do you write?
Stories, poems, fiction,
failed novels.
What does he write?
Stories, poems, fiction,
failed novels.
Both of you? Every morning?
Yes. But no, we try for four out of five.
So you are exactly the same, he says.
You both get up, you keep the same schedule,
you write the same shit.
No, I say. We aren’t.
Well, what’s the difference? he says.

And I think about it.
He drinks coffee, I say.
And you don’t?
No, I hate that shit.
I drink tea.

Hollywood Boulevard

2010-10-22T07:07:00.000-07:00

Where are all the bars in this town, he asks me,
walking down Hollywood Boulevard.
Where are all the bars?

We pass the celebrity stars under our feet,
trod upon for fifty years.
Look, Rod Stewart, I say pointing.

I mean, he says, where do you go to get a drink?
Hank went to bars. Where are the bars?

Gone, I said, Just like Hank.
Look, I said, Marilyn Monroe.
And Chuck Jones.
And Bugs Bunny,
who is only a cartoon,
but then again, so are the rest of them.

This is one of the first times
we are off the highways,
off the 405 or the 101
or the 10 or the 110
or the other strips of concrete
that take you past,
not through,
this city.

Where can a man get a drink? he says.

Britney Spears, I said, and he snorts.
We get back to the lot and pull the car out,
the air warm, and smelling like pot.

We wait at the light and watch the people,
lined up across from the theatre, all the lights
and red carpets. They scream for another bald
actor who lifts his arm and waves limply.

And I wonder, where are all the bars in this town
as I wait and wait for what seems like forever
across from the throngs of fans, screaming
their cameras flashing and popping
and me, still waiting,
for the light to change.

Such a Good Day

2010-10-21T03:04:00.000-07:00

It is not until later,
in San Diego,
that it started.

We found this great little joint,
called Star
and we sat with the black guys
and the Mexicans and listened to
Motown.
No one bothered us.
We sat on the red leather seats,
our scotches in front of us.
We watched the Mexican bartender
laugh and dance and the old men laughed too.

When I got up to go to the bathroom
you said, Baby, be careful
and I said,
Careful? Baby, I’m home.
And this was the way it was.

But later that night,
I felt it along my back,
the creeping feeling.
You see, inside, there are tarantulas.
Things with hair and too many legs that are terrible all over.
They tumble inside me, falling and crawling over each other.
I carry them everywhere, even to the other side of the country.
And I just want them to be still.
You turn off the light,
and they scurry inside me,
their legs damp from the drink.
They hate the dark.
They want me to know that,
in this hotel room at night.
They want me to stay up with them.
And what choice do I have, really?
Even after such a good day,
when we found a good place for a drink
and a good meal
and had a good walk around by the water,
they are still there,
waiting,
hungry,
restless.
They chew on the inside of me with their fangs.
I want them to sleep but they won’t.
I beg them, to be still,
to be quiet.
To let me go, for just one night,
just one night
after such a good day.

Searching for My Friends

2010-10-20T03:37:00.000-07:00

We chase ghosts even when they only come
in the form of metal signs bolted to poles
in downtown LA.
We drive around and around, changing lanes,
trying to find a place to park
so that you can run out and take a picture
of John Fante Square,
in the last vestiges of Bunker Hill.

We chase ghosts, even when they are only
stones in the ground.
Our hands placed upon the grave,
the marker that said, there once was a man
who didn’t try,
who lived a life,
who wrote a life,
and we think
because we read his words that we
knew him too or hope we did
or think we do or hope we have
the kind of life that is really lived.

We chase ghosts,
slowing down on the sidewalk
to pass houses everyone else passes
every day without notice.
Old houses, stone houses, wood houses,
Stained with wind and dirt and new paint.
Hung with ugly decorations now.
They are our churches.
They held the lives of these people,
these people we think we knew,
or we hope we might have known
if fate had been a little less cruel with her timing.

We chase ghosts and take pictures,
of places they have just left,
spaces they once occupied,
when all they left behind are the ideas,
the words, the work.
No one likes these pictures,
“What is with all the houses?
What is with all the graves?”
They ask but they don’t understand.

Ghost chasing his hard work.
These people are real to me, you see,
more real than the people around me,
more real than people I have known
my whole life,
more real than the beggars and the millionaires
and the cops and the old ladies that
build this city.
These people, these dead people,
who still talk to me, who feel as though
they just stepped away for another six pack at the store
and will be back if you just wait, for a moment
on the couch on their front porch,
these people, you see,
they are my only real friends.

Take Off

2010-10-19T02:40:00.000-07:00

They are changing my father’s pills.
This is the way the days are marked.
Sometimes, it is the only way I have
to count the heavy march of time,
Except for when I count it by take offs and landings
that I have survived,
the plane heaving all that weight upwards,
as if it were nothing
and not the miracle it is every day.

We measure time this way,
between the trips, the sickness,
the days that start with work
or a fight,
or by sleeping in.
We trod along, we hurt each other
without even knowing.

Some bury. Some birth.
Some pass their old loves
on street corners and look the other way,
breath caught for just a single moment,
tender remembrance and then the quick release of shame.
It is painful to be so close to another person.

We open and close our mouths,
the sound tumbling out. I watch out for snails
on my walks and hold my breath to keep all the planes in the air.

It is all too pointless and sad, I think,
these lives and deaths,
the cold coming still.
I pull the covers around me,
push up against you, the smell of your skin in the morning,
the sleep noises you make, and I wait and wait for the dawn.

Landing

2010-10-18T03:51:00.000-07:00

Something is wrong, he says.
Something is wrong.

He goes to take off his seatbelt.
Stop, I tell him my hand on his. Everything is fine.
It’s just dark out.

The plane starts to shake.
Something is wrong, he says
and I see in his eyes that he believes it.

This is me, I think watching him. This is what I do.
This is what I usually say.
This is me and this time, I am him.

Later on the ground, waiting for the car,
he apologized.
I don’t know what happened, he said.
There was just so much water
and it took so long to land.

He is embarrassed.
It’s okay, I tell him.
Softer than I said it on the plane,
when I nearly shouted it.
As if shouting it would make it true.
It’s okay.

I don’t know what happened, he says again,
his fingers going through his long hair.
I watch him shift his weight and look down the road.
I don’t know, he says again, not even to me.
But I do.
I know exactly what happened.

These Days

2010-09-29T03:18:00.000-07:00

There is a shift, sometimes,
you can feel it if you lay very still at night,
while the rest of this city is sleeping.
You’ll feel the shift, like a crack.

And it’s down there
in that space between yesterday and today
in that never-was time,
that I fear I’m slipping into these days.

So instead of me, I’ll fill it with these things I carry,
with the journals I have kept
words inked with a dead octopus
on paper brittle and cracking
but always words,
with the postcards
and broken down carburetors
and sand from the beach
with the conversations
whispered over the tops of baby heads
and inside stalled cars in the rain
the wipers frantic like a dying creature.

With the stories I’ve told and retold and changed
so often that even I believe it might have happened that way,
with the rocks from English countryside
and the coasters from the cafes in Paris,
and the maps of Spain,
with the dust of too many silent months,
settling over my lungs,
with the broken keys of pianos
and snapped violin strings,
with the teeth that are falling out
and the stubbed toes and the banged knee
and the broken skull
and the tongues of dead boys.

And especially little letters like this,
from you,
slipped under my door,
that if stacked one on top of another
could reach the top of buildings
all begging for the same forgiveness
that I’m not so generous with,
these days.

Building Civilizations

2010-09-28T03:38:00.001-07:00

Sometimes I wonder if I made you up, too.
The way I have always made up stories.
Especially when you told me that you had never read
all the books you said you did when we were young.

And I stopped on the street, shocked.
I saw my reflection in the store window,
my windblown hair,
my boy jeans, my fall jacket, taken aback.
I have watched you,
over the course of our life together
and even in our life apart,
create and recreate yourself for other people
but I had the secret. I knew you when.
And now, I realize it has happened again,
this time to me.

“It was you,” you said.
“Those were your stories. I couldn’t be bothered.”

When we were little we built civilizations
in my basement. Giant pillows for continents,
toys and dolls for people.
We played God. Some lived, some died.
Back then, I wrote poems too, inside
without paper or pencil I just didn’t know.

And here on the street, with the slump
of your shoulders passing my reflection
I reach out and take your words,
pluck them from the cool night air where they float,
stuffed them in my pocket, like a survivor
and when you were gone,

I ate them, bite by bite,
savoring them, like a secret.

Weight of Gravity

2010-09-22T03:42:00.000-07:00

She’s a mother
and a teacher
and a writer
in that order.

I can’t even prioritize.
I think about all the things that slip away.
The way the light moves across
the room in steady beats.
It comes, and illuminates the
stains, the dust, invades this holy space,
panel by panel before it finally goes,
like a disapproving teacher
or mother.

I stand at the window and think,
there are places out there, where no one is.
I think of deep sands where not even
a spider crawls.
I think of the wind burned barrier
where there is only snow
snow and more snow
colored rose and cobalt.
The ocean, the deepest parts
where even the plankton is still
and the weight of gravity is more than parental
it is tremendous and godly.

She’s a mother
and a teacher
and a writer
in that order.
These words like stacked boxes,
that are light enough to move
from one room to another.

And I think sometimes,
how neat the stitching
of other people can be.
These words, day by day,
year by year, without question
until the definition is etched in stone.
And that is all they ever were
and all they will ever be.

Living Girl

2010-09-21T03:05:00.000-07:00

When my father was lean, and young,
with dark hair,
and strong tan arms,
we went to the beach as a family.

I don’t remember this.
This is a story I was told.
Like all stories, it has a beginning
This one goes:
When my father was lean, and young.

There were birds in the air, flying low
and lazy, waiting in sky like old
women waiting for a bus

and there were broken seashells to find
worn smooth by the water and sand rubbing together.
There was New Jersey food to eat,
with wet fingers dampened with water and
dusted with sand. We were a young family then,
in the predawn of the 80’s. This man, this woman
and their daughters.

My father lean and young
put my fat toddler feet in the water,
lifting and dipping
wave after wave
and sometimes I think I can remember;
can smell his skin,
mixed with the briny water I can taste
on my tongue,
can feel the water, just this side of warm,
frothy pools over the wet sand like a bed,
that I wanted to lay in,
the scratch of my father’s stubbly cheek
as my white baby hair catches on it.

I think I can remember but I cannot
the moment his hands were gone,
the water over my head and under my feet
the steady heartbeat of the undertow
the tumble tumble tumble of my body
the sound of my mother screaming
and then
the ocean said No, it wasn’t this hair,
these feet, those eyes that I was looking for.
The ocean spat me back out
and crawled farther down the beach
searching for the woman she needed to take.
She said,
Not yet, living girl,
someday, maybe soon, but
not this day.

Transparent

2010-09-20T03:05:00.000-07:00

“I dream of an art so transparent you can look through it and see the world”
-Stanley Kunitz

She tells me I should have been a doctor,
the way I keep talking about the body.

I try to tell her I don’t know anything of science,
I tried and failed when I was a much younger woman
and put my heart elsewhere.

I know nothing of the chemistry,
the way the creatures that live far below
the ocean, past light, know only darkness and
nothing of us.

She tells me the one about breast cancer,
that one, she says, opening and closing her mouth.
I nod and make an effort not to look at her breasts.

I’ve thought those things, she tells me.
I’ve thought those exact things. Those words.

It’s a window, I tell her. Nothing more.
I’m just on this side, my mouth pressed against
the glass, yelling to you
and you are on the other side, your ear there,
waiting for
the sound and the heat
to come through in quivering waves
first an echoing hum and
then something feverish.

The Watchers

2010-09-15T03:01:00.000-07:00

I didn’t see the impact,
instead, I felt it.
I tried. In fact, I turned my head when the tires squealed,
but that was not soon enough. It happens faster than you know.

We waited, breathless, key in hand,
for the crunch and scrape of metal to metal.
But there was no sound.
Just the sight of a body thrown up
up up and then down, hard.

And then everything slowed.
And everyone froze.
And we were the watchers.

We saw, his body, lying there,
shoeless.
Ah, we said
it is true, then, about the shoes.
We had all heard the rumors
but now we knew.

He lay there,
not really twisted,
though parts
seemed artificial,
as if they were planted,
potted.
His hand swelling like a limp succulent.

We waited,
after the accident,
for him to move.
Slowly we crept closer,
like animals sniffing out life
in the nearly dead.

The driver got out of his car.
He stood over the man.
What, he yelled,
do you think you are doing?
Why were you in the street? He screamed
his hands on his hips like an exhausted mother.

He shook his finger. He scolded
as if this twisted wreckage,
this doughy muscle and tissue,
sinew bitterroot, scattered teeth,
and all that wet slick blood leaking
from the back of this body machine
weren’t punishment enough.

The Exodus

2010-09-14T03:36:00.000-07:00

I could have been the child who died there.
I think of this sometimes,
now that I am older and
try to keep a steely grip on this life.
We both could have,
laying at the bottom of the waterfall,
bloody,
floating,
spent,
like death thirsty lovers.

My parents would have buried their youngest,
not even out of high school.
My name would have been listed among
the others in the school year book who were dead by

car accidents, disease, unknown sickness
and then me, bloody and crushed laying in the woods.

My mother would have tended to my grave,
My father would not come.
She would push her fingers through the dirt,
leaving dimples behind.
Flowers would bloom and die,
petals dropping.

Everything would chug forward,
one day, like a smoke filed train,
upon which I was not a passenger

and I would wait at the bottom,
in the sleek pool,
listening and waiting
for the ambulance that wasn’t coming,
to the fading laughter and screams of the
mass exodus.
To the priest who would come to save
and then, in saving, damn and curse this place,
and leave my ghost behind in that glassy dirty water.

The Problem of Good Writing

2010-09-08T03:14:00.000-07:00

“We don’t have to go to Tangiers,” I tell him.
“No way,” he says. “I’m not going to be the one who
messes up your chance to go to Africa.”

“It’s not that, I tell him,
it was just that book.
I got this crazy idea in my head that
I would step foot on every continent
from that book.”

But what if there are other places I want to go?
I ask the empty room, looking at the map taped to the wall.
There just isn’t enough time, I worry.

“Sure,” he says, from the bathroom,
then there is the sound of him spitting
out toothpaste. “Doesn’t matter to me. Besides,
that crazy fuck is burning the Koran down in Florida so…who knows.
I don’t know if we want to walk around a Muslim country
screaming ‘American’ you know?”
Then the sharp inhale as he sucks in
and looks at his teeth.

I examine the map again and I think to myself,
man, these books, all of them, not just these ones,
but all of them,
even the ones about to be written,
they are going to be the death of us.

Why You Can't Have a Conversation with a Bar Drunk

2010-09-07T03:30:00.000-07:00

I watch him as he speaks,
his tongue darting
like an errant fish between his remaining teeth.
There are only three of them,
jutting from his dark gums like great stone tablets,
crooked and yellowed.

I’ve been to AA, he tells me.
I’ve been there.
But now I am here.
He says, lifting his arms to show the bar.
No one is paying attention to him. No one ever does.

He runs a tired hand through his hair
adjusts the thick black glasses on his face.
I noticed the tape holding the arm to the lens
has yellowed and is starting to unpeel. It flaps in the breeze from the open door.
His eyes look like fish eyes too, everything about this guy is fishy,
blinking back at me like great glass orbs magnified
as he steadies himself using the back of my chair.

I says, he says, I’ve been to AA.

I nod. Everyone has to be somewhere,
I tell him.
Aren’t you going to ask me what happened?
He says.
I told you, I was in AA,
aren’t you going to ask me what got me back here?

No I tell him,
thinking it’s probably not a very good story anyway.
It’s none of my business, I tell him.
Besides, I’ve got this whole night ahead of me,
this whole life,
and before any of that can start,
I need to finish this pint in front of me.

They Shine

2010-08-31T03:08:00.000-07:00

like little stained pearls
all glossy opaque and tan.
he pulls back the wings so that
I can see underneath
where it turns red.
It is bone and tendon, vessels wrapping.

There is no meat here.

Everyone just crushes them he says.
turning the insect over so that
it’s segmented stomach
the plates of armor are visible.

and this one, he says,
pulling out another tray,
look at this.

It’s a praying mantis,
it’s legs stretched out
like an sacrifice, pinned to the board.
It is so green it is almost violent,
and the desire to both look away and to touch is overwhelming.

They don’t look different,
these creatures, when they are dead
then when they are alive.

Flesh loses the soul,
its elasticity turns taunt and stiff,
there is a harsh change you cannot undo.

But these creatures, their hard scrabble
crunching lives, they still stare up at me
segmented eyes, beaded like dew, watching, always watching,
claws, shining under the light, at their mouth
legs with jagged teeth
wings like handmade paper, veined
ready to un-tack from this prison

and beat
then lift,
like cilia pumping on the first water insect,
the need for survival quickening the heart.

My Father's Life Work

2010-08-30T03:29:00.000-07:00

He picks up the other extension
and starts right away.
Hello?
Hello?
My mother gets off the phone.
Hello? my father says again.

Hey, dad. The phone crackles in my ear.

He tells me how great he feels
about how he mowed the front and the back lawns yesterday.
Both in one day.
He hasn’t done that in years.
He’s very proud.

Then he asks me about paint
and the Yankee game.
What kind did you get, paint and primer?
You need paint and primer. All in one.
Good.
Is it flat? You should have gotten eggshell
but it’s okay. You didn’t know.
Good. Good.
Did you see the Yankee game?
No dad, we put on a movie.

Oh Ally, you missed a great game,
he says, his voice going high.
The pitcher, oh man, that pitcher. What is his name?
I don’t know.

No, really what is his name?I yell into the kitchen to ask my husband.

I tell my father.
Yeah, my father says, that guy. That guy is so good.
Don’t worry about the B12 shot. It’s nothing. It’s nothing.
It was such a good game. I swear, one of the best.
So what else is new? All these kids are here. I’m hiding
in the garage. Now he starts to laugh, this high wheezy laugh.
I gotta tell you honey, I’m here hiding in the garage.

This goes on for half an hour.
At the end he tells me about the drugs.
I’ve never felt this good honey.
I don’t want it to end, he says.
I finally feel like I should. Not like a 90 year old.
Like a 45 year old. This makes him laugh again.
I laugh along.
It’s been so long since I heard him sound like this.
The way he used to.

I feel like before 2003, he tells me.
Before the cancer, and the surgery, the chemo
before the stooped walk he now has,
and the leg pain,
and the sickness and the vomiting
before the catheter and the pain killers
and the exhaustion and the struggle to get out of the chair.
And the struggle to get into the chair.
And the struggle to get down the hall, one damaged leg after another.

It’s terrible like this, I think. To go, piece by piece. To fall apart, to live
through the cancer and watch the rest of you break down
until your life’s work is just
holding yourself together long enough to get through the day.

I can’t remember the last time I felt this good,
he says laughing.
He tells me again, before the surgery I guess.

I guess so, Dad, I say and swallow, my mouth full of words.
It’s great. It’s really great, I manage to get out.

It is honey, he says.
I don’t even feel like I’m dying anymore.
And then that laugh again, high,
like air coming out of a balloon.

Cell by Cell

2010-08-16T03:04:00.001-07:00

My husband reads me the details,
about the couple killed in the city
we used to live in.

And I picture Main Street, downtown,
where the subway is. He tells me about
their children back in Texas.
Orphans, now, he says.

And just like that, I think about the fire
down the street from my job,
the conversation, the air full of soot
heat and ash, the crumbling blackened
charred bones of the building,
its sisters, standing open windowed
as if shocked, dripping wet.

You gather these people,
cell by cell, that share your space.
You breathe the same air as them,
jostling against them as the bus
chugs through the city
like a dying thing. You hate and love them.

You stand in front of these buildings,
these streets, and you watch the body fail.
Limp and bloodless. Smoke filled and charred,
like inanimate thing, a body transformed into ash.
I know nothing of the spirit; neither, I suspect, do you.
You wait and watch but in the end,
eventually the destruction is gone,
cleaned up by the men whose job it is to clean the body,
the building, to make new the face of the street,
and you nod
and you shuffle off,
board the bus,
thinking of the day behind you, the night ahead of you,
rub your eyes and exhale into your hands,
your breath filling the pockets of flesh from bone to bone,
saying,
It wasn’t me. Thank God. This time.
It wasn’t me.

Women who Tend

2010-08-09T03:48:00.000-07:00

We had been talking for hours, as if we weren’t seated in this hospital room
as if my father wasn’t in that bed and the sick man on the other side
of the curtain couldn’t hear us.

We talked about work and weekends, paint colors, the Yankees.
We passed around pictures of the new baby.

It was later when the nurse came, in her shockingly white shirt
breaking up our little party that we scattered, jumping up from our seats
nearly tripping over ourselves as if royalty has entered the room.
We collect at the back and sides, staying out of the way.

She bends down by my father’s bedside talking to herself,
not to us and not to him, just talking quietly to herself,
in this menial task of emptying the sack of urine hooked to my father’s bedside.

She places a plastic jug on the floor and tips the bag over
and I listen to the sound of my father’s urine hitting the plastic.

We are quiet now so the sound fills the room.
The tap of it, all pitter patter against the plastic.
It sounds like a tornado at one point, like it will never stop.

We all look away, my mother and my husband and I.
We look up and down, we clear our throats. We avert our eyes.

I feel the thickness and the weight of my own body filling space,
taking the air out of the room. I can smell the sweat of the living,
the metallic taste of it against the white walls.

It is like an offensive thing, all this breathing in and out, this pumping of blood,
the wet jelly of the body my feet clad in sandals snapping against the floor
as I walk out of the room trying not to think about how many times,
I have seen these women in white who tend to the body.

Starting Over

2010-07-31T07:20:00.000-07:00

It seemed like I was waiting
all day
maybe all year
maybe all my life
to slide the key into the lock
like I did,
and open the door,

to find you there,
cutting chicken for dinner,
and the gentle hum of the air conditioner,
and the R&B you only listen to when I’m not there,
the cats fat and lazy, the apartment clean,
and smelling like a home,

like a place I have been fighting all day to get back to,
with you,

so much so that it was all gone
the second I got in,
all the anger and confusion
all the hours and minutes
and seconds I have been away.
The long long walk is over.

You are sorry,
you say
We are going to redo last night,
you tell me,
We are going to have the night
we should have had.
You kiss me hello
and I put down my bag
and just like that,
we’ve started over.

Did You Sleep Ok?

2010-07-30T03:04:00.000-07:00

Did you sleep OK?
the post card over my desk
asks me.
It’s a picture of a framed post-it note
scratchy boy handwriting,
sweet sentiment,
left by an errant lover, I imagine.

We bought it in London,
in a little museum
in the park after walking all day.

It was right after we saw the Peter Pan statue, I think.
We needed directions and the British lady with the dog
told us not to expect too much.
Though she added that she thought the statue was darling.

DID you sleep ok?
The question we ask each morning,
shuffling around, tripping over two old cats
opening windows, making tea and coffee.

The answer is No.
I didn’t.
All night there was nothing about anxiety.
Bad dreams, nervousness,
The writing bad like this poem,
trying to say something but saying nothing,
nightmare of teeth tumbling out,
and bloody fingers.

Did YOU sleep ok?
Last night, I told you
with bases loaded and the Yanks up 10-1,
that if Alex hits the 600th homerun right now,
we would have that extra beer and sleep in tomorrow.
You told me that was too much pressure for one man.
But he didn’t, even though it was the perfect time.
He was always good for solo homeruns that don’t change the game.
So we turned off the television and went to bed.

Did you SLEEP ok?
At the end of this week filled with long days,
choked with need and want and misery of
this endless summer.
After waiting and waiting for the End,
which didn’t come, you get a bit of jetlag into
continuing your life. You are supposed to be thankful,
and you are because you read the paper and you know
how very bad it is out there. There is still that part of you,
that isn’t re-adjusting back into life and is still planning.

But tomorrow is Saturday so there is always another chance
and the weather is dropping they tell me,
so maybe we’ll have something, love.
Just a little something.

You - 7/29/30

2010-07-29T07:43:00.000-07:00

I always say You. Because I can’t say my sister.
We were not.

And I can’t say my friend.
We were not.

So I say You. So I say I forgot your birthday this year.

And you say nothing.
Like you have said nothing for years.

Your daughter is outside, right now.
digging through the dirt in the backyard.

And your husband has his arms around his new wife.
They are patching something out of the space you left.

This is the moment you were waiting for.
And never got to see. You have become the things you left behind now.
Nothing else.

There are things I want to tell you. No, not tell.
There are things I want to scream at you.

Until I’m hoarse and have no words left.
Until the sound has pushed you away, finally.
Until the plaster cracks and the trees die and fall like monuments to the ground.
Until your tombstone sinks in the groaning movement of this earth.
Until we are all long long gone and it is finally finally mercifully over.

I want to scream all of this. But I don’t.

Your birthday is passing us all by.
Your body so long gone. So long silent.

You show up in my dreams, all the time.
You never speak. That is a rule.

I don’t call you Sister then either. I never could.
I don’t say anything to you, anymore.

Continents - 7/28/10

2010-07-28T02:58:00.000-07:00

I want to step foot on every
continent, and circumnavigate
this fat round earth.

It used to be every country,
but I’m already far too old for that.

So when we talk about Spain
we also talk about Morocco
and I roll my tongue

over the sound of a word,
that counts for Africa.

When I tell my mother she smiles
and says not to do Antarctica till she’s dead.
She doesn’t want to know.

For Asia, we have a plan
for the Trans-Siberian train
across the rough seas of Russian land.

For South America,
I hope for Peru, the steepness of Machu Picchu
or Chile.
Then Australia.

And last
all that ice.
I can’t afford to go to the Pole,
but I’ll settle for seeing the Ross Sea
and McMurdo Sound and the Ice Shelf rising like a castle
at the bottom of this ball
of fire and rock
spinning in all that dark space.

With his Silence - 7/27/2010

2010-07-27T03:37:00.000-07:00

It is like gathering
all the salt from the sea

locked arthritic hands, aching.

His wife opens the water bottles for him.

There is no end to this,
I want to tell him.
No finish line.
This is life now. This is just what it is.
You are beating the cancer, yes,

but your kidneys are dying.
The knee won’t get better.
The pain will always be there.

If you are in pain,
say something!
Be honest with the doctors.

I have a whole list of things to say,
but he will lift
those pale blue eyes
sea water eyes,
like his daughters,
from the paper
to me

and say everything with his silence.

And I know
I will be quiet, too.

Sunday Morning - 7/25/10

2010-07-26T07:47:00.000-07:00

I sit with my mother at the table
and talk about the business of books.
I'm mid sentence and she stops me,
holds her finger in the air.
The silence lingers,
as her eyes scan the newspaper in front of me.

"Who died?" I ask,
because what else could it be?

"Oh, it is her. Oh how sad," she says and for a moment
her face crumples.

"Oh how sad. She was only 48."

"Who?" I ask.

It was a neighbor.
I don't recognize her name
and upon seeing this, my mother,
who has lived for so long in this house
on this street,
describes the departed's location on the block.

"Next door to the Levinsons"
she tells me.
"Remember?"

"Oh, I say, sure," but I'm lying.
I have no idea who she is,
this woman, who my mother tells me had no children
but was engaged to be married,
dead from cancer.

"It's always so sad when a neighbor's child dies."

I think of the boy down the street,
who died in high school and the line I stood on
to get into his funeral. It wrapped through the parking lot.

My father is on the couch,
the newspaper on his lap,
just having fallen asleep,
He is cold, always cold
and his fingers are locking up.
My mother opens all this water bottles now.

and I think about how long they have been here
in this house,
on this street,
my whole life.
Always here.

I think of that and how I hope it's longer still.
Just a little bit.
Please.

Voice of God - 7/23/10

2010-07-23T06:49:00.000-07:00

On the 86th street overpass
in the part of Brooklyn the tour buses
don't go to

lay a pair of sandals,
side by side,
neatly tucked against the
chain link fence.

And next to them a wrapping from the Holy Bible
on audio cd and I thought to myself
even the voice of God couldn't save him,
when he dove and landed on the cars below
small stones embedded, still
in the skin of his heels.

He should have taken the Book.
The weight of it might have kept him
tied to his earth
a little while longer.

The thin onion skin paper
reminding him of his own paper thin skin
down near his sex.

So simply construced
and durable
unlike the body
crashing and popping
against all that metal.

Flight - 7/22/10

2010-07-22T07:05:00.000-07:00

I grabbed your hand
when the plane lurched
and the lights went out.
We were just in the air
and I thought to myself,
This is when they crash.
It's on the news all the time.

Take off or landing.
Right at the beginning and the end.

We were on our way to your grandfather's funeral
and I thought of your mother,
how small she would look
in all that black
her long blonde hair
and nervous fingers

finding out at the funeral home that
we were already gone.

What the Neighbors Said - 7/21/10

2010-07-21T02:55:00.001-07:00

It was an unraveling
like these sorts of things always are

a thin spool of thread
where the sweater once hung

a dead bird
it’s neck craned backwards
at a tilt most unnatural

unfeathered wings snapped
like pencils which you side step

the fall from great heights,
from nest to the shore

from roof to the pavement

from hanger to floor

from heaven to hell

the door slam
like the crash of thousand
beautifully carved marble statues hitting the sidewalk

at once.

Big Sur - 7/19/10

2010-07-19T02:49:00.000-07:00

Am Alone, says the king,
walking down the stone path.
Am Alone.
And at first he means it, they all do.
At first.
Until the silence grows
louder than the noise he used to make
down in the dirty city bars.
It grows like the moss on the trees,
like the gray hair on his arms.
Am Alone, they say
to get better
to be well
and still and peaceful,
to quell the fury.
But they hate it, like all kings hate being king.

They have no idea,
these men
with the bright ideas,
with the looks that give and take
away from the spotlight
and all their fickle tempers,
their broken glasses,
cutting the bottom of feet.
All the roaring.
They hate it
when there is no one to hear them.

Nothing but silence and the echoes
of their own fury thrown back at them
from the ocean’s mocking slap.

But,
still, Am Alone,
something I have never known
not truly.
To live without it.
To forget and be forgotten.
To be still
for as long as I wish
vibrating like an atom.
Forever, even
Am Alone.

For Harvey

2010-07-14T03:22:00.000-07:00

We toasted you the night you died,
but I couldn’t help thinking that you
didn’t seem like the kind that would die.

Which is a very stupid thing to think.

Salinger died. But he already checked out,
decades ago firing shotguns at curious trespassers.
Steinbrenner died the day after

they found your body in the bedroom.
But it didn’t make sense. You couldn’t be dead.
You are too real to die.

You are supposed to be in Cleveland
in the grocery store.
Behind the Jewish lady with all the coupons
arguing over canned soup.
You are supposed to be living through the same
shit as the rest of us.
Bus routes
and late bills.
Sick mornings and fights with the wife.
You are supposed to be nervously checking the phone book
for another Harvey Pekar.

Not dead and still and peaceful.

For Stephanie, on her birthday

2010-07-13T03:35:00.001-07:00

The sun has not yet fully risen
here in the city
as if she is tired from what the
rest of this month has put her through.

But I think you are probably up,
your infant daughter on your lap,
her gentle cooing over the discovery
of her fingers.

I can picture you
on your blue sofa,
the music playing softly
the coffee on the table.
The quiet settling of the floorboards.

And I wish I was there.
We would talk about
when we were little before the house was painted blue.
we would pull out those old stories,
about birthdays
and the streamers our mother would hang from the lights.
About the woods behind the neighbor’s house.
We would joke about our father’s
green lawn mowing sneakers
and the time with the golf club
that ended in me losing a tooth.

We would laugh softly
in case your daughter nodded off.
and for a moment that time wouldn’t
feel so long ago,
and neither of us would feel
the days stretching ahead and behind.

I wish I was there, this morning
on your birthday
but the best I can do,
are these words on this page,
a love letter
between women
from one sister
to another
letting you know
you are being thought of right now
as you are,
as this new mother
a thing of beauty and comfort
your hands cupping the feet of your daughter
a small song unknowingly escaping your parted lips

but also as you were back then, when the world was smaller
a thing of beauty and energy
and white hot streaking summer light
an explosion of laughter
in the time when we were both little girls.

Razor Blade

2010-07-12T02:53:00.001-07:00

I should have moved it,
I tell my husband on the train,
watching the little boy cry and hold his finger.

It’s not your fault, he tells me.
But still, I saw it. I saw it and the other boy saw it
and I should have kicked it away.

He’s too old to be picking things like that up,
my husband tells me. Besides, it happened too quickly.

I could never be a parent,
I say,
I’m sick now just watching this and it’s not even my child.

The father has the boy on his lap. They are all very blonde,
fair,
foreign.
They look Swedish but it sounds like they are speaking German.

The subway lurches up onto the bridge,
back out into daylight.
We are going home.
The boy has stopped crying now.
The mother is studying the subway map.
The father has kicked the razor blade
across the subway car,
like a dead thing.
Not like a killer.
The sunlight catches it and it gleams,
like a smile.

No one on the subway car does anything,
not even me. What is there to do?
Now we all wait and wonder.

I watch out the window
the water of the East River below,
the city retreating from me like a living thing and
think that I’ll spend the rest of my life
wondering if this kid,
holding his bloody finger
this five year old boy
is going to die of some horrible disease
is going to rot from the inside
if it is even already starting now.
I wonder if he’ll get to grow up, get married,
fall in love, have sex, get his heart broken
before it all comes to a horrifying end.
All of this wasted
because of one trip to the United States.

Who does that, my husband finally says.
Who leaves something like that on a subway seat?

And I think I don’t want to know.
But they live in my city.
For now.

American Town

2010-06-30T03:10:00.000-07:00

She is wearing glasses.
That is probably the first problem.
She also didn’t put her hair up.
No one wins Ms. Small Town America
without putting their long naturally wavy hair up.

They only ask the contestants two questions.
I tell my husband that I want one of them to stand up
and scream that it is 2010 and maybe we can stop
subjecting young girls to this kind of judgment
but I know even before the woman in front of me
shoots me a dirty look
that I’m talking to myself.

The blonde down the row will win.
She’s in a short blue dress. When the judges ask her
why she wants to be Ms. Small Town America
she talks about loving her town.
Her sweet little town.
Everyone cheered.
She’s going to win.

My girl doesn’t mention that.
She pushes her glasses up her nose.
She sniffs into the microphone.
And I think to myself,
Don’t worry girl.
You’ll be a poet one day.
And you’ll leave all this behind.
You’ll read Dorothy Parker and laugh.
You’ll find your way to Boston
and then farther on a plane to Istanbul.

You’ll never forget this moment,
when you don’t win,
but it will start to fade, like the tattoo
you’ll stamp on your lower back in five years
before you hitchhike out of this American town