Steam

You wake in the middle of the night, the outside dark and quiet. The radiator reels, a hundred and fifty years of cast iron belching out steam heat to the tenement. A reliable comfort, if a little eager. You move to the living room for reprieve, and oversleep in the railroad room where sunlight doesn't reach come morning. 

Outside city limits, the country begins a slow and steady climb to war. You can sense it, the cornerstones of a nation crumbling at the insistent prodding. It's hard to look at the monsters directly and understand how any of your peers can approve. What do they see when they look at this blaze? The writing on the wall must be smudged in their eyes. 

You walk to the pier, Arctic temperatures blowing through your layers, but the sun bright against your eyelids. A love affair thousands of years in the making.

The words scatter. The days, too. You know this is how it is sometimes, that it'll all arrange itself and come together. There's a spot just inside your open window where the temperatures have found their equilibrium. 

Writing bar

The writing bar remains, even though it is Wednesday, because the bartender wrote you on Monday to say she'd switched her shifts, and you are a sucker for a wink from the city. This bar which is more home now than the place where your keys fit in the door, this bar which has seen you through heartbreak and pandemics and despair and returns. This bar which has earned a place in your liner notes because without it, this manuscript would not be piled high beside you. You allow yourself a moment's catch-up with the bartender, allow yourself a quiet warmth in the orange glow of the light strings, before retreating to that table in the corner where so many of your words came to light. Pull out a manuscript. Look at your words. 

Write a book.  

It's all you're meant to do.  

Chill

You cannot start the day by reading the news, anymore, this habit no longer serves you. The world is too dark, the darkness too real, heartbreak at every turn and when you look back at the decades thinking how could this happen?, well, now you know. 

A fiery sunrise wakes you, Red Hook stretches its limbs like a sleepy hamlet far from the buzz of the metropolis. In a way, it's perfect for you, perpetually on the outside, longing for an in, but also forever looking to escape. You live your life in limbo. And at last, you're letting yourself relish it, instead of thinking it's a state you need to leave. 

There was despair in the world the last time you felt this lightness, you considered its meaning then, too. Now, you can no longer afford to squander the moments on thought. there's a resistance to be made in art, there's a weapon in your arsenal that you are ready to wield. The only time is now.  

The only way out
is through.  

Lunch Box

It doesn't happen all at once, so you're never quite sure when it started. Suddenly you realize that there was a sunrise that winked at you yesterday, that you found forty dollars in the street two weeks ago, that the bartender pulled a few drinks off your tab just before closing. Suddenly you find yourself sitting on an East River ferry smiling, simply because you cannot help yourself. 

Do you remember how we'd see that ferry, with its silly name, back when things were new and the world seemed open to our miracles? Every time I saw it, it felt like a nudge from the Universe. Even after you'd left, I thought, the Universe still sees me, so I am not alone. It passed me today on a Brooklyn pier park, after years of absence, bringing commuters back to Manhattan like it was nothing, like we didn't have a history. Like the Universe had returned from its sojourn to other realms and was again here to let its light shine on me. 

I've been feeling it lately, that buzz, that brightness. I can't explain it, and I don't ask to. The words are simmering again, the life in my veins. 

Hold on tight, my darling
it might just be time to live.  

Homecoming

They've asked you to explain it, and you cannot. If they can scale the Brooklyn Bridge in the afternoon sun, look at all of New York spread out around them, and not feel giggles grow in their chest like bubbles, there's no making them. You cannot apply logic to love

nor should you. 

You climb the four flights to your tenement apartment, clear out remnants of Christmas decorations and construction dust, watch the way the sun sets across the water, how it sets the Manhattan skyscrapers on fire, and you have nothing bad to say about anything. It's been a long time since you felt not just okay, but good. Since you smiled at strangers in the street, since you wished for something bigger than survival. Everything burns around you, but you do not control the sparkle in your chest. It appears at will. You're starting to accept the whims of your life.

As long as the sparkle returns,
sometimes,
you're prepared to live until you 
die.  

Strike

The news gets worse everytime you look at it. You still don't know if that means you should look at it more or stow away completely. Eventually even heads in the sand can be executed, a war doesn't need you to acknowledge it to happen. When you were younger, it was easier to see things as black and white and now suddenly you have your heart in all manner of coals. 

A few years ago, early in a year that still lay unknown before you, you asked the Universe for a change out of your control, for something to shake things up. The year that followed was a nuclear blast to the world as you knew it, the years after like continued fallout, and it was too late to take your wishes back. 

Does that mean you don't wish for things anymore?

It's too long a life
to only get by on
survival. 

Sink

In sleep, your sister finds a charred body in the crowd. You run through an unfamiliar town, looking for an emergency room, but by the time you reach it, the body is reduced to fragments in your hands. 

Is this the end of our Dream?

America, is this correct?  

The morning is mild, I walk down country roads painted in snowmelt, I stop to look at how the sun streams through barren tree branches, it wakes sleeper cells in me, genetic poetry from a life in the North, the stories all revolve around an innate longing to turn toward the sun. Don't tell me not to stare straight into its life-giving force, my eyes were made to absorb it. 

January meanders slowly through the days, as it does, you try to take a page out of its book and place it in your own: meander, slowly, you'll get there eventually so long as you keep walking. 

America, this is quite serious. 

America, I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.