Riot Gear

Pack your go bag. Brush your teeth. Plan the day ahead then lie in bed watching emergency vehicle lights dance around your ceiling. Blue, white, red. A country scatters against your white walls. The helicopters hang in the air again. Sometimes they move. Your block is quiet tonight, but two streets down Broadway is on fire. The sirens weave crooked melodies on the breeze. Meet your deadline, try to eat. In a bunker on the capital, a very small man sits shaking. On his screen he barks and bares his teeth, drooling with the fallout. Do you ever get the feeling he took it too far and now he can’t get the train to stop?

The bakery whose windows were smashed in write messages of support on the particle board that goes up in their place. Your life matters. The rest is just windows.

One nation.
Indivisible.
For whom?

Matter

Walking across the bridge, all I can think is I love this city. The Empire State Building pulsing red, a dotted skyline stretching out reliably as though everything wasn't falling apart, a short, quiet moment on the pedestrian path in mild summer air. But then somewhere along Delancey, turning north and registering the blinking machines humming motionless in the sky, one two three four tracking a hunted animal or a hundred, more threat than promise of peace. Along first avenue, the trash cans are scattered but the street is quiet. How strangely calm in the midst of a pandemic.

At the bodega on the corner underneath our apartment, the windows have been smashed in. Their lights are all on, bright bright bright.

How strangely calm in the midst of a war.

A country falls to pieces before our eyes, egged on by an emperor without clothes and a ruling class without spine. Let us not pretend a broken window is anywhere near as cruel as a sanctioned murder by those who have sworn to protect. The sirens continue, the intermittent waves of people yelling the names of the dead. The helicopter parks itself over our building.

For weeks we sat in our homes, goaded by the rich man who wanted everything and could give nothing.

For years we tried peace, and they would not listen.

Look around your empty pockets.
All we have left now is war. 

Any More Obvious

Breathe in through your nose, she says in that meditative way some voices can, and out through your nose, and then after a few minutes see if you can hold your breath while you run, see if it doesn't change everything. I try to tell her that what changes is my proximity to consciousness but as it is a recording the act seems futile. The day is overcast, still I return home with rosy cheeks, new shades of brown along my arms. I forget how much I love May when it is mostly kept from us.

I woke out of the daze of another meditation (all I do is meditate now, we look for answers wherever we can when the world is unwilling to provide them) thinking if nothing matters, then what does? and it seemed to make sense at the time, like a dream that wakes you in twisted sheets but hints that maybe it knows something you don't. If nothing matters, then what does.

 I sat down at the word processor that afternoon, calmer somehow, less afraid. The story wrote itself under my fingertips -- at last, after months of struggle. You're invisible now, you've got no secrets to conceal. 

If nothing matters, then you've got nothing to lose
trying to make it.

is Through

"Help," she said, to no one in particular. "I seem to have fallen down a rabbit hole, most unconveniently, and I had probably better do something about it."
The rabbit hole was very deep, and very large, and though she should have been falling rather quickly, instead she had the peculiar feeling that she was, in fact, floating down it at a pace that, under different circumstances, might more accurately be described as "pleasant".
She wondered at that.
How some things could be utterly terrifying, but if the circumstances were altered somehow, they might be just the right spot of adventure. How people sweltered under too much sunshine, or turned to dust from too much rest. The rich do not fall down inconvenient rabbit holes, but don't they miss out on learning something new?
She did not wonder much at rich people.
A set of velvet sectionals drifted past her and out of view. A squealing tea kettle, a number of baby sharks, an attractive man she might have loved in a different life. An alarm clock raced past, seven o'clock and and she heard clapping in the distance.
"Help," she repeated, "I have forgotten who I am, and I don't think I'll be able to land without figuring it out."
But the Universe lay quiet around her, the stars extinguished. A voice inside her head whispered that maybe this wasn't the question she was meant to be answering to begin with. 
"Help," she said, quietly now. "I think I'd welcome rock bottom, if only it would come."

Saturation

(for a short moment,
the apartment is empty, save for
my hesitant Bambi steps into the
silence,
ten weeks of constant
companionship of
the absence of
solitude
in isolation
I have forgotten
what it is to
occupy your own space to
let your voice build in
deep breathed crescendos like
you've never known a better therapy and for
months now your breath
has been silent, I
indulge and let it
cleanse me entirely
did you know the vibrations
start
under the soles of my feet
and beam all the way into
the cosmos when I sing it's
magic and I never know how I live
without it
when I do)

for Rebecca Elson

Sometimes I eat the stars
feel them wriggle and dance down
my throat
like jellyfish
beaming their last little light
before being swallowed by the
darkness that is
my hunger,
infinite like the space
from which I plucked them.

I wish I wasn't saying
the emptiness inside me was
as endless as a Universe
without light
but you follow that star
and see
if it doesn't get smothered
extinguished
by my need

You stick around
and see
if not everything I touch
turns
to dust. 

the New Deal

Some will die
the rest must live.

How cruel life when it insists on carrying on through our fears. How we stand on shaky legs and are forced to continue, because as long as there is life we must live it, our Nature will not allow anything else. I wake in a hung over daze, none the wiser and soon it is June, do you know any more what you are doing than you did before? The sunshine brings fearlessness, desperate New Yorkers flooding the streets and racing for spots of grass like hopefuls of the Oklahoma Land Rush, we run into delirium and pay the next morning with the deterioration of our poor, pale, quarantined bodies. I watch 13 hours of PBS documentaries and wonder at the world. How much would it cost to buy a used car in Kansas these days?

It's all an unending collection of words, isn't it? A collection of all the things we've found, magic dust we've sifted from the galaxies, a life built on our best attempts to make sense of the stories, of the mdelodies that swim through our periphery. What a glorious, wondrous, beautiful blessing. 

Sometimes as an antidote
To fear of death,
I eat the stars.

S 5th

Parallel park
a moving truck
in Williamsburg on a Saturday
night
The new neighbors will help you with that
couch
Order margaritas
To go
When a new world allows
it
Find joy in the small things

I discovered pictures
from
ten years ago
From
ten blocks away
I
didn’t remember
How much I
missed their carefree
manicures their
fuzzy memories I
have a life here now that
echoes
Across the
Bridges
I am
Happy.

Notes

When someone tells you
who they are,
Believe them

Even when they decide to forget,
themselves.

Paradise Cove, Revisited

Suddenly, somehow, after years away, the song reappears in my playlist, an unassuming blessing of record label bureaucracy no doubt, of lapsed rights or purchased catalogs, perhaps it's all been dust in a drawer while I ached in silence, entitled millenial children habituated to receive all they could want at the flip of a wrist. And then here it was, like the tiniest gift, like a wink from the Universe; I listened to it on repeat and forgot for a moment where I was.

That's the thing about darkness, you know. All it takes is just one bright moment and all is forgotten. All it takes is someone looking your way like they see you, and you remember you are alive, again.

Pearl

My parents think I'm never getting married, so they've started just giving me the heirlooms now. We laugh, but the world races ahead around us, years fall like petals from our eyelashes as we sit locked in ivory towers watching our hair grow. A caramel sauce turns golden under my watch, how fragile the crystals, how quickly everything turns to ash. She writes to say she's coming into the city and can we stare at each other from afar? Everything is a trembling ask. We all need a refill.

A deadline runs toward me. I never met a deadline I didn't like, in the end, when it wriggled under my boot heel. The days are long but the life is short and there aren't enough deadlines to make you actually live it on your own. They still ask about you. He's so good to me, she says into the 6-foot space between us. Seven years and I haven't yet dared say out loud that I don't deserve him.

Years fall like petals, our deepest dreams like sand through our closed fists, we cannot protect ourselves against the sweeping currents of the world, we are pawns and all the world is a strange game, what do we know but here, and now, and maybe a little of what it is to love? My thoughts scatter across the avenues. Summer lies in wait. We'll get where we're going,

I think.

Roar

Midway through a meditation, my roommate runs in asking about the pot burning to ash on the stove. We do the best we can, but it is not often good enough these days. I try to sink back into spiritual guidance but all that comes out is tears. I am all questions, don't ask me to lead. It occurs to me that I fear that which lies close to my chest because it eclipses everything else. Because if I follow this spark into the darkness, I leave you behind, I leave all of it behind, if I follow this spark I am untethered, I am ink and nothing else, I will extinguish when the rent can not be paid and I will not be sorry.

But you ask who wants to live forever and the answer is I do.
I want my cake and to eat it too.

I've tried feeding on poetry and all I've had to swallow
are
tears.

Barbiturate

Monday morning, everything begins anew. We keep thinking this is the state of emergency, but hasn't it turned into a new normal? You cannot sit around on your couch staring into the fire when it has spread to a bed of hot coals you're required to live on. Even drunk you diligently wash your hands for 20 seconds, even in despair you put on clothes and attempt to pay your bills.

I'm trying to figure out what to do with my life, I tell him over long distance cocktails, when Queens is no longer on a map I can cover. Haven't you been saying that for ages? he retorts and I don't know how to tell him that life is a scavenger hunt we never quite complete. The dog nestles into the crumpled duvet on my bed and I cannot move in case it scare her away, it's a metaphor I no longer care for. I've terrified weak hearts for decades, let them walk over the coals for once, I'll be here. The city is emptying out of the faint of heart, of those who lived here with one foot always out the door, let them go. I'm doubling down on you, New York. From now on, it's all or nothing.

I know so little. But what I do know, has burned and blistered so many times along my skin that it is impervious to any more fire.

What I do know,
New York,
is ready to set fire to the sea.

a Love Letter

The streets have gone quiet, hibernating under government mandate and restless worry. We are all busying ourselves overmedicating and overdrinking and undersmiling, I spend my days reading about the Dust Bowl because aren't we all just looking for a blueprint somehow and the ground has turned to sand. I sleep soundly in the silence, but not as well. I left this city before, time and time again, and all I did was sleep: sleep was never what I was looking for, at all.

An earthquake rattles Tonopah, the strange desert town of infinite galaxies in the night, and you remember just what it was to be in a bubble, how you are never alone when the word is your companion. That is the lesson, you think. The New York Public Library publishes an album of New York City sounds from before, and you sink into its chaotic comfort, while you remain inside your padlocked room. I am never alone when the word is my companion.

This is how you write your way out. 

(Oy)

If you wear your body out enough
It doesn’t worry so much about your brain

Sometimes that’s a nice break.

Feels Like

Another cold front sweeps in over the Northeast. The meteorologist hyperventilates into a fit about the coldest May in memory, like we didn't already know the world is ending. I am going to make it through this year if it kills me. I pull myself to the river like a marionette, one flailing limb in front of the other. I force myself into clothes, into contact lenses and socially appropriate conversations across plastic barriers. The act of going through something normal helps, at least for the moment. At least before the silence that follows becomes a deep hole under my feet.

I am going to make it through this year, if it kills me.

At the restaurant across the street, a man drunk at 7:30 in the morning relieves himself in the nook. Teeters around, looking at the stream he created. Seems to wonder if he should follow it, before he wobbles out of view. The morning is sunny. Poetry lies in piles around me. I am all hoarding these words for a time of need and completely ignoring that the time of need is here. You can't save your canned beans for a Depression if you won't eat them when it comes. You are in the Dust Bowl now, what are you doing pretending these bricks of paper are best saved for after the rains return?

What good is hiding all this ink for another year,
if this one kills you?

Once There Was a Way

This bag of bricks in my gut doesn't drag easily through the days, this lead in my bones disputes every light day I thought I had in my past, surely it's best to stay away from the drink in my hand because there is no way my body won't sink in just the slightest drop. You hear their kind voices at the other side of the veil but the fabric is thick and the sounds muted, your ears are balled in cotton, do you remember how poetic you once found mental illness because all your heroes wanted to die but first they had to write. You spent a life building a wall against that oven and now here you are, watching it crumble when you lean a little too hard.

The view from the new apartment was breathtaking, 365 degrees of New York stories and a hundred futures in the making. An orange glow flooded the old bank, the elevated subway trains, new glass buildings and rickety old Brooklyn stacks. The subway train ran on its elevated tracks across the bridge to Manhattan. There's more than one answer to these questions, a voice says over the line, but I think I am too many questions, I think I am too hungry to ever be sated and I think I devoured treats that were not offered to me to begin with.

I think I am breaking at the seams, and I'm asking for thread
from the butcher.

Living with Yourself

The radiator roars to life, mid May and it heard about the snow, heard about the polar vortex, the radiator does not judge or despair, it only puts its nose to the grind stone as necessary.

I judge and despair all the time, and I keep losing track of the grind stone.

There was a moment tonight, as I walked home across the Williamsburg Bridge through the sunset, crying, that I looked out over the city and thought I miss New York. As if I wasn't just a hundred feet above it, as if it wasn't all here and within my reach, as if I hadn't left it so many times before and truly been without, truly been a world apart. We are not apart now, New York, I wanted to yell but somehow I don't believe it right now, when the city sleeps, when its doors are shut and its melody silenced. I am not who I was, New York, is that why you won't love me anymore? Perhaps it's not you, but me who hasn't changed, who hasn't managed to roll with the punches and build a new life, perhaps it is me who is still wading in the muck at the bottom and isn't it pathetic. I'm still dragged behind your ride into the future, clinging on when I haven't got a ticket and all this mud in my face with no one else to blame.

I'm not here 
I've gone away
Don't call me don't
write. 

Grace

A few days pass. A long run home along the west side in the rain. Daytime drinking and scrubbing kitchen tiles. They extend the lock down. It snows in May. I wish for something new at 11:11 and more than anything it made me sad to.

I don't have any answers.

I don't know if any exist.

Bumble Bee

I wake early, the day so long when it begins in the quiet moments before anyone else rises. I meditate, shower, think of the rain outside the window. I write, I write, I write. By early afternoon I wonder that it is not dinnertime, amazed that there are more hours in which to live and create. The rain continues. I do not run. My to do list is a long jumble of checkmarks, but the gray clouds knock the air right out of me, how strange this life. Across the time zones, she says, I feel guilty bringing him into this life, when we are not strong enough to hold him together. Everybody's battles continue, even as everything else ostensibly is put on hold. I move to the next step on the to do list.The rain ends, against forecast.

You do not owe anyone your story, but yourself. You have been walking around this tome so long, too afraid to lift the cover, but close. It's all there, and you know it.

You know once you read it, you'll never be able to go back.

You've yet to know that's a gift, not a curse.

It's Up To You

I want to wake up in a city that doesn't sleep reverberates around the narrow brick alleys of the West Villages. Neighbors who maybe never knew each other trickle out onto stoops and sidewalks to clap and beat on their pots, to remind themselves that this is the only place they ever wanted to call home and as long as we are still here, we still can. We spend the afternoon in a 19th century townhouse, quickly wisping past old wallpaper and narrow creaking staircases to the little garden the back, old fir trees stretching into the blue sky and ivy wrapping itself around the neighborhood. Do you know someone built this house once, and everything was different then. What this brick has not survived, this fir tree, this oasis. We are but specks in our own Universe, oblivious to the enormous miracle that carries on outside of us.

At dusk, I walked home through Washington Square Park, and the Empire State Building pulsed in red and I thought, this beating heart is the only thing that ever mattered. As long as it beats in me, and I in it in return, we're ok.

I'll make a brand new start of it  
if I can make it there

 The miracle continues, whether we dare to believe it
or not.

Bloom

My skin changes color, flushes and warms in the afternoon sun. I had forgotten what summer sun feels like, what bare legs and carelessness are. We walked to the west side and looked at New Jersey: TriBeCa was a desert, but how the buildings become yours. Do you remember that diner in Jersey? It feels like years ago, but I think it had already started to get warm. March feels like a whole other year. Six feet has become a cruel distance. The truth is I don't want any distance at all.

if you never say your name out loud to anyone
they can never ever call you by it

I'd like to think I'm working on it.
I'd like to think this silence around us
is letting me practice setting my voice
on fire.
I was only ever trying to make sure
you were listening when I did.

Two

But I want to givey you a hug, she says, her little 3-year-old arms and legs tangled around themselves in bashful nerves. She knows the rules, but she's already standing much too close. I look at her father, and we both already know the answer. When I nod, she throws her arms around my neck and we stand in silence: she perhaps grasping at a normal moment when everything else has been strange around her, me grappling with all the perspective afforded to adults about what new normals might even mean. It is hard to defend oneself against the immediacy of children, how they are still the core of humanity when we have tried to layer protection against it.

The day was beautiful, warm, sunny, the parks teeming with people and a disregard for disease. My skin flushes in patchwork hues across my limbs. I had forgotten what it felt like to live.

May never fails to remind me.

MayDay

Another Friday rolls in, another month, time has lost most of its meaning if you cannot glean it from the turning leaves. You gather little morsels of success, little nuggets of checked lists under your belt but too many hours while themselves away into grains of sand and float away. You are just one focused lens from realizing your emptiness, but if you can hold that thin veneer at bay for just a little longer, maybe (just maybe) you can make it out of this alive.

One day you will be better than you are now.

Just remember that.