Farewell

I'm retiring this blog...I'll be posting poems, stories and novel excerpts over at AllyMalinenko instead.

Come, join me. We'll have a blast.

Birthday Presents as Red as Thread

When I wrap and pack
the birthday presents that I will
then take to the post office,
I’m struck
with the fact that you are soon to be thirteen.

And I stop to remember myself then too,
back through time,
unraveling the years,
like shedding clothes
as one walks through their house

and it all comes undone this way.
And for a moment I can see myself
as I once was
holding the necklace that your mother
now dead
gave to me.

I imaging giving it to you.
The sentiment. The power.
Entrusting you with the only thing I have of hers.
It would be a sort of un-doing. Severing the lingering red thread.

I cannot think of love as a constant.
It must, for me, wax and wane,
the way a wave comes to the shore but is still always part of the deep.

I have to think of it this way – as something I can touch
once or twice but not hold. Otherwise
I can feel my fingers locking
and I know I will choke it to death.

Winter Hardy

On my walk through the park,
towards the dock,
alone
I pass them.

Succulents all fat and stout,
waiting
through the heat
waiting through the wind
waiting through winter.

There is a stillness here,
that until now
I didn’t know I was seeking.

Later at the dock,
in the wind
while the Mexican children
rollerskate
over the planks of wood
as the water laps below me
I sit and wait.

There are several unknown things
down there
that maybe
we are better off not knowing.

I watch the sunset over staten island
all hot white light
and burning orange
so bright I can taste it

and when it’s gone,
I turn and watch the lights wink on
downtown,
and think
at this angle

Manhattan looks so tiny.
Small enough to fit
in my hand.

Year Fourteen

There is paper and there is ink.
There is the couch, the gentle depression,
the part the cat has scratched.
There is the glass and there is the ice.
There is him
And there is me.
And for awhile there is silence, except

Then there are words that come out
and my brain saying, shut up shut up shut up
but I keep talking and he keeps talking
and then there is pacing,
the long walk down the hall.

The stiches that held it together have come apart.

This is the power of words,
the moment is both the recording and the record needle,
it is the doing and keeping, creating and solidifying
into things we cannot, do not, take back.

We are the palimpsest. We can rewrite this.

He shifts. He opens and closes his book.
He does not want to talk,
but I am tugging loose a thread I should not have touched,
my fingers picking and picking,

because tomorrow I will go to the doctor
and he will listen to my heart
and I will think about dying.
Because that is what we all think about when someone listens to our heart.
Think about the hard ground, the mushroom blossom.
Think about the grainy ash between fingers in another winter
that we won’t know. Think about a universe beginning and then beg it to stop.

I want to ask him each day: Is this what we have been waiting for?
Are we just too scared to admit it?
But I’m not speaking now. He is.

Imagine the whole ocean fitting in your mouth.
Imagine holding it there.

Marble Soul

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!

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

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

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.

Dying Cat

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

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

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

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

- 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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Es Mi Culpa

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.