This Year

Joy

We cannot help who we are, we are riddled with hope, even in the light of years now of this complicating factor, she says We can't un-know this, and she is right and wrong all at once, we are covered in visors, we are none the wiser, this year comes to an end and we have the audacity to pray something may be different. I wear bright red lipstick to an audience of none, New York City tip toes past the evening as Alphabet City lies quiet, I know you feel broken but this year gave you all sorts of gifts you could never have shoplifted for yourself, they had to come to you through pain, you'll remember them as hard-earned when you look back on them, 

and you will look back on them. 

A new year arrives. We walk into it quietly, hesitant, but determined. 

The only way to human
is ahead.

December 30

I dreamed of you last night. Hours and hours of you, I cannot now remember all the ways in which the night went on with your smile melded into it, all I know is I woke with sprouts in my chest. It is a gift to know another; it's been so long since any of us unwrapped anything. The year comes to a close and you have sand in your hair; the year comes to a close and I have sprouts in my chest, it is another year of unknowns ahead but I am not afraid to make plans anymore. I am not afraid to put joy on my to do lists because joy does not depend on the world functioning as you would like it to, not now. Not anymore. 

It's been two years of fire now, of tearing down all that we've spent lifetimes building, and some days we sit sifting the smoldering ashes between our fingers, seeing nothing but all that we have lost. But every now and then you get a moment when your fingers are full of glue, when you put together the ruins and weave something new entirely. I am not afraid of hope anymore. I am building it out of strengths I didn't know I had until I needed them.

Flirts

The year races to its end. What year? Too much abandoned hope, too much numerology by the wayside, do we carry dreams anymore? The weather coasts in anomaly, the statistics speak in horror, you no longer flinch at the alarms. Your mother says you sound happy, and you don't know how to explain the peace that resides in you, it looks misplaced in its bright ignorance. I read a new story and feel the oxygen sink into my lungs at last. A year ends but another begins with the same truths you've carried always. Write, write, write, the theme is Joy, the theme is do you remember how once there was a wonder, you've been tired, yes, 

but you are not tired anymore. 

We do not carry dreams,
perhaps.

They carry us.

DeKalb

Our flight is canceled, she writes from across the country, and there's no one to take the dogs. You get dressed in the late evening, emerge into the world you shut out when the numbers spiked again, wrap your lungs in so many masks, the puppies devour your bottomless love, you see the grains of sand run out from the cracks in your hour glass, but what is it compared to the beaches we've already lost in the last two years? 

There's no use trying to scoop the shores back into your pockets. 

Choose to be the ocean
instead.

What Light

I wake early - too early - the blinds all pulled to the top of the windows and bright Sunday morning washes the room. Bright Sunday morning after Christmas, how still the town. Last night, I took a long walk around the West Village, quiet but for a few family restaurants, a few errant tourists, and remembered what it is I meant to do with this life. Dark brick colonials, spacious rich townhouses, narrow cobbled streets, this city always knew how to ground me in a hushed magic, I returned to the East Village at peace, stars beaming from the windows of my shoebox, my every move permeated with joy. 

In the morning, the doves have lined up on my windowsills, basking in sunlight, afforded a brief pleasure, I walk slowly around the apartment so as not to disturb them. The sky is achingly blue. I see answers and clarity lined up ahead of me. 

They look an awful lot like hope.

Are Easier

The thing about stillness is it takes a while for the forms to take shape. You can only hallucinate fairy tales and ghost stories onto slates fully blank, can only coax sprouts after the ground has rested. I spend the days on long calls with abandoned friendships; it's a generous lesson in love, a gentle reminder of life. At the very back of my mind, quiet little whispers begin. I know them well, long for them like fond absence, but try not to scare the little whisps away. They will come. She asks if I have any goals for 2022, and I cannot begin condense into mere words all the ideas in my mind. They come out sounding a little like hope. 

The neighborhood is dark, a desolate country village in the dead of night though it is Saturday just before the dinner rush. I venture out in amazement. So much has been sleeping here, for so long, perhaps it is time for us to wake now. 

Rest this last little while. These sprouts are ready to bloom.

Present

(You give yourself these gifts
- this time, this care, this hope -
less with the idea now that it will pay
off later

more with the idea that
the gifts are the
payoff
themselves.)

Eve

The street fills with available parking spots, you see treasure in the emptiness, how quiet the neighborhood in an apocalypse. I find an orphaned Christmas tree two doors down and drag it back to the shoebox - the tree is too big but I am determined. 

Later, when the last kids on sixth street are asleep, I sit on my couch and watch the lights twinkle in it’s branches. This bright pink couch that I bought only because I thought it might bring me joy (and it did.) This tree that I schlepped up four flights, leaving needles like a trail on the landings, because I thought it might bring me joy (and it did). After two years of hollow pain (two years is mild because were you not shattered long before?) to be filled with joy is a strange deliverance. I run my hands along the brick around my border up fireplace. Brick wall. Like I dreamed when New York was still a fantasy. Brick wall, alphabet avenues, New York in my pocket, I loved you long before we met but I love you much, much more now, it’s a strange gift, time. It convolutes and twists our images like fun-house mirrors but at the end of the ride we are still who we were when we walked in. If you leave me when we’re twisted, you’re forgetting one day this will just be a photograph we laugh about. 

I go to bed late, too late, awaiting miracles and saviors but the truth is I’ve been saving myself for ages and I think we’re starting to get somewhere. We’re making our way through this whole damn amusement park my love, are you ready? Best hold my hand, we’ve a ways yet 

To go. 

OOO

Made a deal with the devil? he says, and your champagne-riddled brain cannot begin to explain how the deals were made decades ago and everything else you do it just pretend. You put up an out of office-reply in your inbox, you close the tabs, you close the year, what a year it's been and you cannot explain the ways your body had bended and grown since last time the clock came around. We hand over presents at a distance, everything is still surreality, we enter the third year of melting clocks in the desert, but we know the drill now, it's easier to dance to new harmonies when the beat is the same. I scored a few takehome tests from the drug store on 3rd street, there's one here for you when you need it, the messages come across like drug deals. 

A holiday arrives, another year leaves. I fall asleep with the string lights blinking, I am not
sorry.

Will Be Miles Away

A variation rages, infiltrates our holiday parties and peace of mind, tears up travel tickets and throws sand in the punch bowl. New Yorkers kickstart a well-oiled machine, lining up at testing centers, mummy-wrapping entire bodies in masks, canceling everything in a five-day radius to save the Big Day, while the bar graph spikes out of its every ceiling. 

There was a moment, just one or so, in the last two years when I thought New York might buckle under the pressure, might decide to stay down and not get back up again. But I think I was just tired, was just riddled with this sand in my eyes, I think I forgot, for a moment, what town this is I made my home. 

You cannot break a body built by fracture, cannot drown a city made of gutters.

We will rise from this, too. We will dust ourselves off and see what remains, see who has stayed through the storm. I am not ready to call it quits, New York, do you hear me? I have seen the ground against my cheekbones, have tasted blood at the bottom of this boot, I am not done. I have wrestled with the angel and I am stained with light and I have no shame. 

Another dawn arrives.
Don't you dishonor it by thinking you
cannot.

Intermittent

I wake late out of heavy sleeps, a village alarm dragging its drawl across the valley, the sirens 15 minutes behind, what rush can we possibly have here. The house is quiet. I realize before the coffee even sinks into my wrinkles that I only have as many hours of work in me as there is sunlight, that come dusk I will be five layers of Christmas lights and deep into the advent of a nap. Nothing sleeps as well as the country. I postpone a meeting and buy myself more time before returns. 

 Is this what we wanted with our one, wretched life? 

I say I'll write all the poetry when the night quiets, but when the night quiets I thirst only for sleep, I say I'll make right all the wrongs once this darkness passes but it dawns on me now if may never pass at all. Make hay in the dark, dig where you lie, bloom where you are discarded to the wayside. 

We have no choice. the only way out is through.

Prelude

They leave mid-afternoon, say lock the door when you're ready to go, say take your time and enjoy the tree, life in the country feels like a long afternoon of Sundays, feel like you can stretch your legs and fill your lungs, I went for a run in the sunshine and remembered through all the thickets there is always a current of gratitude. A dark year races toward its inevitable end, we try to shed it like layers, like skin that no longer serves us, if you shake confidenly enough can these feathers molt until the wings are made new?

I am tired early but go to bed late, time is irrelevant in the country, Monday approaches but it feels less like Monday and more like shouldn't we spend long mornings drinking coffee by the tree? Life is coming, everything's coming, 

what do you want to be like
when it is here?

Upstates

The wind blows in fury, a gale, like everything is amiss. It shakes the foundations of your little Victorian home, makes you think of wolves. The night is warm, all out of place. 

He ruins your night by claiming the space for his own, by claiming you smile, your hair, your walk down the grocery aisle, you wonder what it means to own someone and you wish you couldn’t imagine the feeling. Pay the check before the glass is empty. She says tomorrow we make French toast. 

You wonder how many friends it takes to erase 

And entire foundation of society around you. 

Ends

It’s over, she says in the early morning. Just like that, it’s over. Support systems mobilize, you set up a triage in your living room, the other errands of the day disappear to lesser rungs on the totem pole. Two years of my life wasted, I’ll never do it again. 

You tell her time heals all wounds but under your breath, it is inconsequential today, time is only the dull blade against which you push your skin, how could it bring any relief with the blood loss. I feed her pasta, nod and let the story go another round. They year continues to take from us and we wonder where it ends when the answer is 

it doesn’t. 

Ants

You schedule a week full of meetings, days full of no space in your mind to think, just one foot in front of the other, your bank account reels but Christmas is coming and you’ll be damned if you don’t shove some happy into your eyeballs. Even the dive bar has a tree. 

He beams into the classy hotel bar a day later, orders a martini, lights up the room with casual confidence only real money can offer. Says she wanted me to come to New York and get you. Paints a life of sunshine and smiles across my eyebrows, leaves the check blank, tries to convince you that the other side of the world has manhattan vibes too, but he forgets how you adore even the dirt, even the broken, and no one puts that on a brochure. You feel a little like Judas.

Later, underneath the Christmas tree in Washington square park, the merest hint of a snowfall floats down the strung lights, everything is whisky in my veins. The life is strange and wondrous. I’m glad to remember.

Title

Monday morning stretches into oblivion like a long line of grays, like an endless ocean of shrugs, there was a time when I bathed in poetry but perhaps it's just my rear view mirrors playing tricks on me, would not be the first time I turned drops in a waterglass into tidal waves. My nerve endings tremble in anticipation, looking out for any sign of approaching fire, any sign of icebergs below the surface, ready with an arsenal of paper shields, they turn to ash at slightest touch. 

The answer cannot be to conform, to dock one's boat to the steady barges of a slow channel, I know it makes for peaceful sleep, but how will you ever get anywhere, what poetry can there possibly be in stagnant pools? You were made for poetry, even scraps of poems are better than laundry lists of neverending Mondays, you spend your days on the ledge now but you haven't fallen out yet,
you're not falling out
yet, 

Every day is a balancing act
and the water is full
of sharks.

Owe it All

It wasn't until I walked out the front door, Brooklyn quiet and sleeping, that the block reminded itself to me. Twelve years and change, a sweltering summer without air conditioning, a return to this city and enraptured disbelief that it was possible to come home. I fell in love with the bagel store around the corner, the Italian bakery up the street, the sound of the subway rumbling underneath. Everything is different now, the quiet confidence of my steps,  the dimples in his cheeks, I don't recognize the block anymore until the soft fondness wraps itself inside my chest. I lived here once, I think, but I didn't know all the beautiful gifts to come. 

The train back to the city is quick, dropping me in the East village like a whirlwind of youth and Friday night fumes. The heat is working again in the little shoebox on 6th street, the air is heady and my limbs ache in recognition. It seems a little trickle of life returns after all the long months of hibernation, but there is no telling what we are in for yet. I RSVP yes to someone else's offic holiday party, as she says "We have this narrow window again for some fun, enjoy the eggnog before you fall off the precipice" and it's like we both know just what we're saying. Gather ye rosebuds, the plague is with us still. I go to bed thinking of dimples, of familiar sidewalks, of what it means to believe in a future. 

The gifts aren't all gone,
just because you cannot see them.

A Little Night Music

The piano keys are dusty, now, you have long since forgotten the medicine that lies under their spell, but it remains, after all these years it remains. My rickety scaffolding crumbles, I spend hours staring into oblivion, until the music returns, until the soluions line up around me. I go for a long run along the river at sunset, find motor memory in old notes, listen to ages full of song, I sink into longhand, wrap myself in Christmas lights, there is brick and mortar at your fingertips yet. I look at pictures from before everything fell and mourn the person who disappeared from within me, I tell her I am all gravel now and she says I love the gravel, and your lungs fill with air for the first time in a month. I am more gravel than perfection, it was not what I would have chosen. 

But we are here now. The plague continues its incessant wipe across the land, it breaks us all, when we come out of this it will all be different. But you have been broken before, and somehow the sun still rises, even in your chest, you have been broken before and you are still here to see it. 

I am determined to see the sun rise
again,
I am determined
to love this gravel
with everything I've got.

Decem

I'm reluctant to wake now, the aquarium bedroom chilly with winter winds, the mornings dark, life preparing for hibernation. Another month ends, they do so quickly now, don't they? and we have to carry on regardless. The year races to its conclusion, too, how many years have we lost now to this disaster? We are not the same as we were before.

I'm still trying to find wins in it all. 

The thing is, you've known your life's wins for ages. This morning, I read a manuscript from my own fingertips that felt brand new, I have stories for days, the day doesn't seem as cold, as dark, as lonely, when I am draped in printer paper full of ink, the life doesn't seem so impossible to endure when everything comes out in words, I know the win already why
am I looking anywhere
else?

So Loss

I have some bad news, she writes, the hour late in the homeland and isn't that so often when we choose to rest? It's been a long day, it's been a long life, let me lie for just a while and see you again in the morning. We pray for mornings, we pray for heavens because everything else seems to incurably painful. He died at peace, with mom by his side. I call my father (assuring myself that since he is alive now, he always will be, it's a ruse, and this is fine). 

The heat still doesn't work in my apartment. I hear the super running up and down the stairs but cannot get myself to stick my head out, this head full of prayers now, I sleep with triple layers it's nothing the North didn't put in my pacifier decades ago, what does it matter. These words only serve to remind you that you will die, one day you will die and there is nothing you can do about it. Lessons about fragility are heavy-handed in the moment, best let the darkness sink in for a bit before attempting to craft it into art, why do we craft things into art anyway, should we not spend our days

just holding hands?

Greens

The vacation days melt in a tizzy, you’d mourn their passing if it wasn’t for all the riches they bring. Your two dearest friends book trips to cross the ocean and you think you have never been so lucky. The day rains but you putter around a kitchen, stroll along a quiet hamlet street, there are two seats left at the bar and the bartender remembers your stories of a year ago, this is what it is to build a name and grow your roots. Tomorrow you return to the shoebox on 6th street but it is your shoebox on 6th street and that makes every difference in the world. I dreamed about you again last night but it is different now, I know it’s not really you. Another year approaches and I know, somehow, that I will be better now than ever before, that I will take this crumpled twist of burned debris and mold it into something new. When I was younger I knew I wasn’t quite like the others and perhaps it scared me then but 

Do you know? 

I am not scared of anything anymore. 

Once you have walked through the fire and back, the coals are only ever palettes for the paint. 

Giving

The day is designed for strained conversations and rethinking all of that from which you came; instead I spend the day thinking of all to which I do not wish to go. This life is complicated, and sad, and full of longing, and really we are all just trying to do the best we can. People I love across the ocean find tickets to traverse an entire pandemic, somehow a little sprout of hope grows through the thickets of despondency. I turn the out of office message on my computer and close the lid, letting a morning of kitchen puttering clean out the torrents in my mind. With the cobwebs swept away, all that remains is emptiness and you think 

Is this why I’ve kept it so messy in here? 

It’s hard to see the great darkness 

when it is so close 

When it is so real

When it turns out it is 

All you have left in the 

Silence. 

Unwritten

The evenings end in strange angles of words, in quiet, dark country hamlet streets and a creeping feeling of peace at the edge of my fingertips, this is what repose will do. Your alarm clock rears up for one last hullabaloo (you always hated this word, but sometimes there is no other), and you know if you just make it to the end of this sundown there is a deep breath and hours of words for the taking, so close you can taste it on the tip of your tongue, it's all snowflakes in rainbow colors. 

The windows are thick with frost. You sleep under 15 blankets like a reverse Princess and the Pea. The sun rises over the Hudson River. How many years have you been coming here now? The children grow under your nose. You age, you can feel how you age. There is something magical around the corner, there is another spring around the corner, you know the only way to get to fireworks is to stay alive long enough for them to be ready you are
ready. 

One more day till deep breath. 

I am ready. 

Upstate

I don't know why it will not come. Under pressure, in a time crunch, in a strange house with other voices pushing at your timeline, I do not know why it will not
come. 

The only thing that works during pain is poetry. I think of long country roads in frost, think of how desolate a barren tree, I make worlds out of words where none existed before, I forget time, this is how it will
come, I

learn and relearn the same lessons so many times, after
a lifetime of screaming I am not sure
what it will take for me to 

here
[sic]

.

On Writing

The thing about it, of course, is that you need all the time in the world. You need to pore over old prose, collect hidden meanings from unended sentences, string together dreams like a mad detective, always a little too close to the case, never in a rush to see what else is out there, never tired or world-weary or in need of a good nap. 

The stories will not come out under pressure, will not appreciate the ticking of a kitchen egg timer underneath your shirt will not
come when call and only
barely when coaxed you
stare at blank pages and hobbled post-its and think

There is an entire
world there 

waiting

but it will
make sure you
earned its
trust 

before opening the door.

Born and Raised

Early mornings on First avenue are strange aliens scenes of the east village, wide streets empty, a quiet peace to the November sunshine. I pick her up from the train and we sail through an empty Holland tunnel, only to get lost on the New Jersey turnpike in the next breath. Philadelphia appears like a little spaceship on the foliaged horizon, by now I know the last of the way and everything isn’t as fraught anymore in the greetings. 

We go to bed late, the neighborhood quiet, the dogs nervous. It feels like all those trips of our youth, weekends of sweatpants and hair braiding, the comforts of unconditional relationships years in the making, and I think some things need time. 

Maybe more things than we realize. 

Ghost Coffee

The coffeshop buzzes with late afternoon freelance energy, manic Macintosh laptops oozing busy and important. The three older Jewish gentlemen are unfussed by this self-importance, arranging themselves in a tight corner and instantly demanding every attention through their vivid conversation. Do you know why they call in Manhattan? he asks his friends and in the same breath exclaims Wrong! They orate at each other, trivia from hours of poring over the truths of the world. Coffee arrives, and the old hippie in the corner pulls out an orange presciption pill bottle. It's cinnamon, he heaves at his companions, I put it on everything. I put it on tuna, did you ever put it on tuna, Ira? Ira looks at him with an implied eye roll. Putting cinnamon on tuna is like putting ketchup on ice cream, he ends the conversation and carries on speaking about the stars on the American flag. 

We look at each other across the laptop screens. No one will believe us, we mouth at each other, knowing exactly what the other means. This is why we live in New York. The men go on to talk of growing up in West Bronx, of Brooklyn accents and how the Torah comes full circle like a magic trick, and you think, the world is still out here, we are still out here, everything has changed and yet the magic of human beings has not. 

Ira gets up from his chair, makes an abrupt and important exit. The bar returns to its unencumbered buzz, I return to the myriad of tasks on my to do list. 

Pocket the gift for later.

Bootleg

The bill doesn’t add up, you remember whiskey shots and unknown friends along the sticky bar, everything smells of cigarettes and a time before polish. You revel in everything, taking deep gulps of a life so different from what you have all been offered in this your Golden age. The night grows late, you know you are meant to write the pages, do the work, go to bed on time and namaste into the mat but here is an anodyne better than medicine. 

You want to tell him all about it, know just how well your banter would fit along the bar, see how everything would make sense between the two of you but that was in the Before times and nothing is now as it was. 

You go to bed in a sweltering apartment, ask your super to turn it down but he’s busy washing your car to make up for his own inadequacies, we are all working through whatever we arrived with it’s a ruse, the journey is never over. 

You walk into the unknown with hope, at last

and it is all you could have asked for, now. 

On a Preposition

The morning after a big deadline is like the sea afte a great storm. It seems impossible for it to be so still. My to do list is scatterlings and orphanages, the apartment is at once freezing and rising in steam, New York is a ridiculous place to put your heart but we all do what we can with the cards we were dealt. 

I take a slow, short run along the river, legs stiff with disuse, the air cold now and the leaves clinging to one last desperate plea for attention. I take pictures dutifully, amassing them on my phone like relics of each season. Here it was fall, here it was spring. The nights are so dark now, I lie awake thinking how there is never enough time for all the things you want to do. 

The days are long but the life is short, is that what they say? It'll all be over soon. 

I return to the word processor, my to do list screaming from a corner, abandoned. You've made it work before. Why wouldn't you be able to pull another miracle from that hat you carry, really?

By the Way

There is a space that can only arrive in silence, can only arrive when you have closed the door, turned down the offers, cut yourself off from the things which serve to distract you. In this space, suddenly there is magic, and curlicued words, and all the things you thought your life was supposed to be. These moments, when they come, are so rare as to be delicacies, but so precious as to carry you on through the desert until the next oasis appears. It's a cruel fate, to dedicate your life to such suffering, such endless longing and short moments of celebration. 

But is it not a crueler fate, to have none of the fireworks, to trudge through a day in already worn footsteps, to clock in and out of a hamster wheel leading nowhere but back to the beginning? 

I dig for answers,
my hands come up with pins.

Take

An autumn bluster arrives, dark gray winds blowing the gold out of the honeylocust outside my window, I wake with the weight already in my chest. The sleep would not come last night, tidal pulls of all the world's questions appearing in the rare stillness and I was caught unawares. Are you ever caught unawares by the spectres in your silence?

The words come eventually, slowly, each one aching itself onto the page wrapped in my fears and assumptions. Is it all over now? The years beckon at me, remind me of a thousand late evenings staring into the darkness while words and smoke coiled from my open lips. I lit a cigarette recently and felt ill, is this what becomes of us. 

You vow to claw your way back. If you cannot write a sentence, write a word. If you cannot write a word, find a letter. Let it wrap itself around you until it chokes the fear from your veins, let it be the weight that sits on your chest until all that is left is stories, you know there is a little magic dust left att the bottom of this barrel and you are not giving in until it
gives
out.

Wilt

Feel the earth sink around you. 

Feel the soft drag of nostalgia, how it echoes inside your hollow barrels. 

See the words begin to come out: remember. 

Your words grow out of a stillness 

you cannot schedule between tasks 

on the to do list. 

Whirl

The days rush from under you, spinning in strange aches and confusing maelstroms, time becomes a figment of your abundant imagination - maybe you never had any to begin with. His face on the screen lingers, softening your panic, maybe all will not be disasters in the end. 

New York is a dream in November, even after Daylight Savings robs you of your will to go on come four pm, at least the mornings are a dream, at least the little shoebox on 6th street is a mountain of windows, you cannot be angry when you dreamed a place such as this into existence. New York continues to shine its light on you. 

You go back to the drawing board. You know there was a purpose there, waiting. You just needed breath enough to find it.

Dove

Don't trust a thin pastrymaker drifts past me in the late afternoon silence. Meditations can be so strange when you leave yourself open to the currents of the universe. The woman in the meditation room asks me to imagine dreams of a life and all I see are ink blots, all I see is a life in words, hours and hours of words, again the answer paints itself across my headlights, it's too frustrating to wear yourself thin grating against reality on a daily basis.

I spend a day with the dregs of a week, the last stinging tentacles of disease, we gather around an imaginary dinner table and speak of kisses, the tears are surprising but in the end we are hopeful about swoon. He asks What was the last kiss that felt like home? and I cannot answer it, the words will not come out, I'm keeping this one to myself, you see, I fought too hard for Home, too long, when it shows up in kisses
I keep them to myself. 

We spend an entire life
just trying to get where we're
going.

 

Cygnets

We meet on the corner of Port Authority and Disneyland, this strange maze of bright lights and destitution. We squeeze into the little five bar on 9th avenue and squeeze in next to College Bros and Suit Bros and one of those quirky older ladies who believes you are interested in hearing what she has to say. The musical is awful, Off Broadway at its most tragic, so close in geography yet so painfully far in.. well, everything else. We rush back to the village before the aftermath has even worn off, order bowlfuls of expensive wine, wash ourselves clean. In the morning, my head pounds cruelly, but I rise to the word processor and wind into the Otherworld, familiar yet achingly far away. I am lost in its magical pathways, ever trying to find my way.

But at least I am there. 

The heat rises in the little shoebox on 6th street. The bodega reopens its flower shop, celebrates with flags and music in the afternoon sun. New York is beautiful beyond measure in November and it's a lesson as worthwhile as any. 

Any truth you've ever known can be rewritten. 

There are marvels left in life yet to find.

Hold

My head is cotton, a body of limbs under water and the whole apartment swims in a sweat. Somehow, the hours are longer in fever, I write and write, unencumbered by the normal restraints of society. The silence reminds me, somehow, of all the things that ever mattered, truths crystallized by the force of illness, by the non-negotiable holding of a breath, I meditated late in the night when the pills kept me from sleeping and all I could see was tenderness, how has this pandemic wiped your touch from my memory. 

How has this pandemic wiped my memory

?

I pick up a pen again. He asks about summer but winter is here, they speak of winter but I spent the day bathed in sunshine, I dreamed this little shoebox with all the windows into existence there is no

end to what magic

I can bring into
existence.

Degree

The fever rises in me, washing across my skeleton like splashes in a hot tub, I can't tell what's the radiator steaming along the side of my leg, I forget how to breathe. The scarier tests come back negative, we've just forgotten what a regular old infection is like, was it always this immobilizing? I lie in bed and watch the stories unfurl, how does it always work like this, how does it still manage to surprise you? 

I fall asleep in the bath, later, I drift into the voids of the in betweens, everything becomes poetry in the flow. 

If the word returns to me with this illness,
I don't want it ever to pass.

Magic

The hours look differently under the word processor. There's an ease to the day, a gentle hum to the street, and somehow each sentence begets the next, painting entire worlds underneath your fingertips. 

How is it possible to have all the Answers,
to know love in your heart, 

and keep choosing the wrong paths instead?

Achieve

Two thousand, five hundred seventy-seven posts. How many manuscripts, how many stories. Nothing is easy to count in the piles at your feet, your floor is poetry by now. You start anew. Blank slate, white page, new month, new you, the human spirit was built on blissful ignorance. 

There's a magic in the untold story, in that moment just before it reaches you. You see its outstretched hand, sense its scent on the wind, feel something stirring inside you, something like hope. You remember the delirium of so many times before, the conviction that you'd gladly give up every other love, gladly set your house on fire, if only the story would remain with you and let itself be told. 

It is an illness, perhaps. 

But we're all going to die one way or another. 

I agreed long ago to let this be what kills me.

Hallow

They yell from the street, expectant faces full of candy and paints, everything is a dream when you're five. You waste away the days mired in guilt, but there's always a Monday, always a chance at a clean slate. A new month begins, a dark month full of endings but you always found the word in that darkness, always sparked by its stillness. After a month of scrambles, you vow to do better, vow to build space for the beating inside your chest, it is November now, it is years and years into the jungle and you are still making your way through it, if you could

make it this far
you can make it through

All the rest. 

People Pass

The weather turns blustery, spirits traveling on cold winds to stretch their limbs and check in on those they've left behind, it's all roll of the dice who's worse off. I sleep late in the little shoebox, the radiators bubbling and no one to interrupt the spectres inside my chest. Close my eyes again and see all the truths line up: how the way we spend our days is how we live our lives, the distractions of love and happiness, at the end of it all, how only one thing glows like a treasure, how it never followed prescribed courses and retirement accounts. Later, I repot the little avocado tree that has been flourishing in the shoebox's window, see imprints of its roots at the bottom of the old pot, touch them tenderly to see a life straining against its edges. How comforting a home can be, even while you have outgrown it. How leaving your mark doesn't mean it's good or bad, by definition.

The only answer was always the Word. The only reason was always to let it roar until you die or it dies in you. 

there is no other way.

and there never was.

a Fool

There's an emptiness that arrives after departure, a reminder of things ignored and forgotten, long before the distraction. The to do list so long, but the tendrils of imagination swirling around the nape of my neck, aren't they always more important than whatever else clouds my judgment? What is this life if not one best devoured in poverty, in creative liberty, what point is the straight and wide when there are side streets and unknown exits off the highway. The car sputters and dies on the corner of my block, how else would I know that I love it now? That it promises freedoms and wilderness? My mother sits on my bright pink couch and says alright then, this makes sense. I make plans to put everything in storage and drive into the American West, into nights of a million stars and books yet unwritten. You call later, knowing full well all the lines already performing inside my head.

I can never thank you enough for all the things you gave me,
and I only didn't for all the things you swept from under my feet. 

Stall

The to-do lists and deadlines pile up around me, mountains of demands screaming in my eardrum while I cower in a corner, exhausted by the nor'easters dragging around my little shoebox on the corner. The super doesn't show, as he always never shows, we all battle demons but differently, there are flowers in my vases but tears in my limbs, I haven't written a good word all year, its absence rips at my sinew, devours my insides, I falter. 

There are things more important than six figure incomes and looking good on paper. 

You forget, so easily you forget. But when the word reminds itself to you..

How the heart swells beyond anything you ever dared to dream.

Espera

Sunlight beams in through the south facing windows in the little shoebox, impending winter reverses course. I run along the river, believing in another day. He writes, and I wonder what slumbers in me still, how long it will remain in hibernation. Bury myself in work, in the way a to-do list can twist and turn around itself. 

Sometimes we are more questions than answers. Keep your nose to the grindstone. 

Even babysteps one day lead somewhere.

Milling

The street downstairs is blocked off, they intend to tear the whole thing up by its roots, they intend to turn it over and maybe start afresh but all it means is you will not sleep till dawn

but would you have anyway? 

The weather turned on a dime, you pull out mountains of warmer clothing to make it just two stops into Brooklyn, just two steps into your imagination playing tricks on you, the Reverend is on the stage playing music and you can’t help yourself, there’s something about an old spiritual that makes you smile into a silence, he walks you reluctantly to the train and in the space between you forget to put on your mask, forget there was a pandemic. The heat comes on in the little apartment on 6th street. A moon is nearly full outside the window  

You sleep, but only on paper. 

Passing

The sun shines down on anxious New Yorkers, promises another few moments of bliss, promises a snooze button on the darkness or whatever dangers lurk. We sit on a pedestrian St. Marks drinking sangria and making jokes, we sit on an unsecured east village rooftop pondering the nation we chose, we sit in a tenement shoebox wondering what art is left to make, I think there is magic to be found after so much drought, that could not have been seen in the riches. He speaks in riddles but all you see are the dimples in his cheeks, all you will remember are a few breathless softnesses in a rickety stairwell, the last two years have taken so much from us that we must welcome the gifts when they are given with open arms, with the absence of defense. They say the weather is about to turn, they say gather ye rosebuds while ye may, but you have lived through a hell, you have walked through many a fire, if anything were to come out of all this pain, 

perhaps it will be the knowledge
that you did, too.

Open

We get seats near the top of the tiny theater, latecomers squeezing in along the rafters, no one knows how to do this anymore so we are all foals finding our footing together, there is a sweet kindness in the steps. They read poetry and verse, sing songs, tell stories, we clap and cheer and remember what life is lived in the margins, you hear new words tell themselves to you and you think maybe the last two years were rough because the magic didn’t have room to whisper itself to you in the stillness. For a short while you feel the illness that sits in you abate, feel the lightness on your chest that comes with breath, remember what it is to be human. Your heels click clack across the cobble stone all the way home, you love New York like your life depended on it and it does, oh it does, today a bright pink couch was delivered to the little shoebox on 6th street and I know what they will say about me when I’m gone but lord, I am not afraid to say it while I’m still here, it comes out at odd angles but all it speaks 

is truth. 

Trellis

October carries on in gray clouds across the weeks, dragging us slowly into the season like no one really has the energy anymore to worry about if the sun is shining. It's been years since the sun shone, for some, what's the point in waiting around. A million deadlines wake me from my sleep and I think we knew we'd look bad with a melancholy fondness to some of those despairing days, and here we are. Anxiety runs rampant through my veins and I can't catch it, can't draw it out of the speeding blood. She writes to say he's become a millionaire selling NFTs and you cannot begin to process the twists and turns of this world. Is this why people pick up and move into the woods. 

A lone morning glory blossoms on the fire escape, while the jungle of vines that went before it starts to wither. Is it worth any less for its late bloom? Or, perhaps, any more?

The day stretches out ahead of me in a panic. 

I don't have the answers, yet.

Lucy

The gears are rusty, winding themselves around curling irons and lipstick shades, ordering whisky drinks at the other end of the bar and wondering what the point is on a rainy October evening. But you run to the F train like something in your spine knows what it’s doing, you navigate late night brooklyn like it used to live in your blood stream, theres something about muscles reviving with use, fall waits in the margins, the avenues lie quiet on Sunday nights but the bodega florist on the corner will still wrap you a bouquet and Key Foods doesn’t close, this is New York after all, not some little backwater suburb from whence you came. We wax poetic about the city but it’s clear he doesn’t have the language for it you do. 

It’s late and you are anything but tired. 

That’s all New York’s doing. Don’t go getting it confused. The city never goes to sleep 

in you. 

Tomato, tomato

Rain arrives, cold air and gloom, for the first time since you don't know when you welcome it with open arms, light a candle that smells of old bookshops and hours without end. When you were a child, did you know time? Did you understand how it needles itself under your skin, breaks apart your luster, your ability to climb trees straight out from your window and veer down rabbitholes? 

No. 

And that's exactly the secret. They get you by eating away at the parts of your soul that thought time was a plaything, was a malleable clay, they tell you that each minute is weight its worth in coins and if you're not weighing it in coins it is worthless, this is how they get you. 

So it turns out your ignorant youth was right all along. Burn the scales, burn the lessons in which they teach you fear, keep their parasites out of your blood stream. 

Pay your rent, forget the rest. These trees were meant for climbing.

Ambition

I rise at dawn, strange dreams of old lovers in my blood stream, I am surreal for hours. Try to weed whack my way through a few pesky deadlines as they grow and gurgle around my fingers on the keyboard, forever a jungle and never a clearing, see the window of my own imagination closing as the demands of a supposedly real world grow heavier. When at last I shut the lids of the word processors and go out into the New York City afternoon to actually process my words, it looks lighter than before, easier. 

Return to words of my own making, the familiar sting of a bourbon glass in the margins, an entire world drawn up out of nothing, remember again why I came to this little town, why I came to these crooked conclusions, the world will mold and mold you and sometimes you are right to give in, let it change your shape but oh, when it twists your nerves do not relent, do not give up, those nerves bleed poetry the kind that makes you hear your own name the way it was given, makes you certain again without any doubt that your strange and wondrous image came out right after all, came out
just
how it was intended.

Indeed It Should

Return on the BQE in the early afternoon, a hazy skyline draping itself across the distance, Delancey street forever a traffic jam, I turn down 6th street and find a parking spot just steps from the front door. New York is benevolent when it wants to be. On the fourth floor, the tops of the honey locust leaves have yellowed in my absence, but the avocado on my windowsill sprouts a new branch. Tropical fruits guaranteed before the end of the decade. A change in season promised by the end of the week. 

I refresh the fall foliage map on my browser. This is me embracing change. This is me with a growth mindset. 

Do you know, I had the strangest thought today, in the little shoebox apartment just off Tompkins Square Park, the feeling of fall coming in the window, the piles of to do lists tumbling pleasantly around my feet, a novel manuscript warm in my hands. I thought, for just a moment, that I was happy, and that I might look forward to things to come. 

When you have been crawling so long on the burning coals, with only the goal to keep breathing,
hope seems an awful lot like an oasis in the desert.

Agains

The answer was always there.
Perhaps the great challenge of life
is to learn how to listen to it.

Crash

Fall asleep to waves, wake to waves, breaking against nearby shorelines, the ocean is a tonic at every turn. I go for a long run along the eroding bluffs, watch them crumble into the sea, see my cheeks burn in the autumn sunlight I cannot anger. In the late afternoon, sprawled out on a faded towel at the edge of a grassy dune, the words all return to me, the poetry, the dreams. After a year and a half of dread, somehow I can still feel joy. We are nothing if not incessant optimists, forever turning pages and dreaming them into rainbows. 

Perhaps that is what life is. Keep turning pages and believe in the ones whose colors bring you joy. 

Turn enough pages and you'll always find one that does.

Try Try Again

Your cheeks turn brown in the late season, belying the October truths as they fall from the trees, but in your chest you have bought yourself another month before you go under. We run a long trail to northern beaches, past the obscene villas, I feel my muscles strain and remember who they are. I begin to think the same of myself. The warmer days lead to quiet evenings, I squander valuable minutes in the inertia of regular people, is this what it means to live a life? I had been hoping for more. It's possible life is saying the same about me. 

We go to bed early. I lie in the oddly decorated leftover bedroom listening to crashing waves and cicadas outside the window, is that not the gift in its entirety? To have the ocean at your very doorstep.

Remember this, when your head fills with cotton again. The sea will heal you when you are not paying attention. 

You can make real the wishes that you never even dared speak.

Dipper

The morning warms. I speed through the mountains of work until the sun beams down on the splintered wood deck, what is life on the gold coast if not a carefully manicured humility. We sit on the beach and watch surfers feign casual while their wallets bulge, watch dogs careen along the breaking waves and everything has an air of suspended time, nothing is real here. 

Later, we stand in the dark and watch the Milky Way cloud itself in a ribbon across the skies, a web of stars pulsating against the insignificance of our impossibly short lives, my hair still drying from salty waves. How small we are, after all, and yet how much room all these insights can take. 

I go to bed alone. 

The life feels longer, then.

Elvira

Long Island is long, at the very tip there is a lighthouse and autumn, cold winds from across the entire Atlantic and you didn’t bring enough clothes for this journey. The people along the beach are white, so white, with tan eyebrows and pockets lined with hundred dollar bills, I recoil against my best intentions. Later, at night when I go to fetch some forgotten object in the car, I see a million stars stretch across the night sky. It’s no desert darkness, no dusty Milky Way, but it’s still a light nudge from the Universe. 

You are here. 

I sleep to the sounds of crashing waves, autumn winds, tired resilience. Tomorrow will be cold. 

You are here. 

Fee Fi Fo Fum

I see the blank page languishing on the desk top, don't worry. I know all my faults and abandoned castle ruins, scaffolding still leaning against each other. The wind picks up now, fall is here, I sleep with the windows open and wake in a chill. 

The city returns to me in gentle nudges, how we could never have expected this turn of events. One day suddenly you are on a subway train and your muscle memory kicks in, one day suddenly you are in a 3-story dive bar in FiDi watching terrible off-off Broadway awkwardly kilter along your pilsner, running in the rain to catch the R back home and something feels familiar. I careen down the east side on a bicycle, I careen up the stairs to my shoebox apartment when it's been too many hours away, do you know most days I still don't know how to live an entire life but every now and then there comes a moment when I don't think so much about it, I just enjoy, and after all this time I will take that moment, I will love it and hold it tight. 

So much is still burning, and crumbling, and decaying inside your skin. 

You'll take the peace where you can get it.

Whiskey Sour

I started walking. It wasn't intentional, I just tire of the inertia that came with the 2020s, just tire of the three square feet that make up my existence, I started walking and I didn't know how to stop. Do you remember when you were young and walked all night, for hours, what a strange life this is. I walked down through the Lower East, swerved through Nolita, raced across Houston, by evening a full moon rose behind the towers in Williamsburg, a strange silence settled over Stuy Town, and everywhere, at every turn, the city shimmered and glittered and whispered I am still here, through all the devastation of the last year and a half, it is still here, I tried so hard in a previous life not to make it out alive but that's all done now, do you hear me? I'm not the same now. 

We break
and break
but we are not broken. 

Maybe this is the time when you declare what you are made of.

Sekretess

The weekends twirl and toss, remind you of a life Before, a life when you rushed from one commitment to the next, and I sit on the subway home from Bushwick late in the evening, texting neighbors for spontanous rendez-vous in summer-buggy back yards, what is September in New York if not the true delights of summer, all blue skies and movies in the park. I stumble home at midnight, hickups and giggles taking turns, I nod at the little station wagon, I swipe left on everything I see, because do you know that nothing so far has delighted me more than life on these streets. I watch home improvement shows from the homeland and wonder if I will ever walk that land again. How strange life, that the more days we live, the more doors we've closed. There was a time when everything was open windows. 

I go to bed late and cannot sleep. 

There's a message in there, if you'll hear it.

Figured It Made Sense

Weeks rush to their inevitable ends, your life rushes to its inevitable end what
can possibly keep itself off the ledge how
are any of us supposed to be immortal?

I came here with scraps of paper and a dream outside rat races and yet
here we are don't we
all succumb to middle age after all?

I am more question marks than periods,
more commas and run-on sentences than
complete stops, than
finished thoughts, 

but honey I am still
suitcases full of scraps, still
piles and jumbles and joys of words
age
hasn't taken any of that from me
age
doesn't actually take so much as give 

if you look at it closely if you
count your pennies with an
open heart

the poet writes you from across the river
but you do not answer his pleas

You have your own poems
to dream, 

you run to your own end and make
the journey the thing that's
inevitable.

Loss

Some days I fear the words fall from me, tumbling out of my fingertips onto and into dust without having made themselves useful in any way, without having created any sort of music, emptying their vowels and emptying reserves until I have nothing left to say - or no means by which to say it. He says he feels old, that he's ready for the quiet life, ready to produce something meaningful and I wonder if we are an entire generation pummeled into the ground where this pandemic was only the final nail in an already solid coffin. 

I sat in Bryant Park last night, watching another old movie as the skyscrapers lit up around us, a thousand New Yorkers cheering when the lovers found each other, when the villain got his dues, I know it can never be how it was and a great innocence has been taken from us but oh, when New York sparks the whole house comes down, the Empire's downfall be damned. 

I didn't fight in this pandemic, I see that now. See creatives unfurl their wings and fly on the hot air of struggle and I couldn't, but here's the thing. There's a tree growing on the 5th story brick ledge of the building across the street, it makes no sense, but it found a way to grow where it stands, here's the thing. 

When all the digging's been done, and we make our way out of this, I'll have so many legs to stand on there's no way I won't jump to the moon.

Calls

At what point do these words become empty?

Just because we duet well together
doesn't mean we should.

Charge

Summer clings by the skin of its teeth, stretching its last handouts toward your parched lips. We set up birthday parties in the backyard, cook impromptu dinners and cavort down the FDR on a sunny Saturday morning. They closed off the highway to Battery Park and the air is full of low-flying helicopters. We cross the Brooklyn Bridge. Twenty years ago people walked with dusty briefcases and unbelieving eyes across this bridge, the city carries its scars like a merit badge, we never forget but we never give up either. One night later we sit on a lawn across the river, blankets spread across the warm twilight, watch a summer classic on the inflatable movie screen while the skyline of Manhattan glimmers behind it. I come for the view, not the movie. Come for the reminder that whatever else I do with my life I made this one right choice and it was worth everything. 

By Monday, the heat breaks in a lightning storm of epic ambition. I lie in bed watching the spectacle, flashes dancing from one end of the firmament to the other, smacks of light mixed with sharp needlings through the darkness. They put so many windows in this apartment I feel like I have been given more jewels than I deserve. 

But then, it isn't love if you're not always trying to earn it.

Well

Emerging from the depths of disease is a strange process, familiar and foreign each time, strange but common. There's a tentative flame at first, flickering at every gust, it tries to send little sparks and see what may catch in your chest. You stretch careful offerings to it, kindling dipped in only the slightest whiff of hope but daren't look directly at the light lest it extinguish. 

Then suddenly you feel skin under your fingertips, like discovering there was a body to you all along. There's a smile that doesn't require all your focus to appear, a run along the river that doesn't threaten to bury you at every step. You feel something that seems almost like peace, because you daren't call it joy. At every turn you expect it to disappear again, but you add one pebble of good onto another until at last it feels like a leg to stand on. 

You are still deep in the woods. 

But now there is a path through it.

Nerve

Drag a body out of heavy sleep, I was trying to solve a riddle I didn't even remember I carried in my blood stream. Surely I would have reached it if not for the alarm. 

We are perpetually inches away from the answer. 

September is gentle, somehow, easing autumn into your field of vision, trying not to startle you as it comes. You scare easily these days, every dendrite poised like a violin string, vibrating. But I am determined to find the lost pieces, build this ship back together, be someone who makes it out of the flood not with my shoes dry, but with my lungs still breathing.

I feel the air begin to set my strings
on fire.

South Tower

You have it down pat, she says casually, you should just work here. We joke that she can pay me in the cheap beer I come to drink at all hours anyway, if I just check vaccine cards and direct people to the bathrooms. Walking home later, the first sweatshirt evening of the season, swinging north to seventh street to check in on the little station wagon, I think it's not a bad idea really. Isn't this what community is?

At home, in the quiet little apartment above the deli, the television revisits a sunny September morning twenty years ago now. So impossibly long ago, yet present in every passing day on these south Manhattan streets. Outside the bedroom window, two bright beams soar into the sky. We never forget because we are made to remember. Bodies falling out of windows. 

September is impossibly beautiful this year, clear, quiet, saying nothing of impending doom. Across the ocean, your homeland lifts all restrictions related to the hijacking of life as you knew it. The lesson isn't ready to make itself known yet. 

You carry on.

or Another

The bourbon moves in for the season, early mornings with their cool breeze now despite warm late-night runs along the river, it's a confusing time of year. She writes from the upstate bliss, says it's the last day before the pool closes for the season, is a hundred Sunday scaries stacked on top of each other but if you haven't had a summer you cannot be sad to see it part. The only people putting away their whites tomorrow are the rich folks of the northeast and you haven't owned a loafer in your whole life. 

I chose poverty, I chose art and I chose New York and at the end of the 

season

I am not sorry.

Silent

Days pass in quiet mumbles, in averted eyes and failed restarts. An anniversary of 15 years in this city passes in sweet recollection; New York holds my hand as everything tumbles around us. Years ago I made deals with the devil, and the irony is not lost on me how he comes to cash in. 

I dreamed we kissed, surprised kisses out of years of wreckage. Don't worry, I know dreams get convoluted, don't worry; I know we have settled on never being so happy. I sleep with my window open and wake before dawn, cold air dancing over my naked limbs like taunts about the coming of fall. This year will be different, I etch into my skin with a dull pen, perpetually misunderstood teenager trying to will my voice into existence, still unsure if the years ever are different when I try to make them. Pandemics can still sweep in over the best intentions. It's when you try to please everybody that you lose track of what to believe. It's been 20 years since the towers fell and you don't feel a day over ancient.

It's okay. We'll wake soon, can pretend we won the war and all we have to do
is climb out of the rubble
and then we'll see the light.

39

Impossible numbers add up on my abacus. I write myself words but do not want to share them, they are mine now, some of them break me at the delicate seams, but some will make their way inside and strengthen the bones, and I cannot give them away while my core is so weak. The mouse remains, I watch him run into the stove when he sees me. The exterminator says he'll be there at dawn. 

Another year has passed, and didn't we all think we'd be somewhere better by now? Still, another year has passed, and this is where we are. Dig where you stand. One day this pain will be useful to you. I know this isn't what you had in mind, but listen to me now. 

One day you will look back on this time and see it as the time that built your muscles, that sharpened your vision. One day you will look back on this time with softness in your heart, and the storm clouds that seem so encroaching now, that sit like a weight on your chest, they will somehow come to look like wisps of cotton candy. 

You made it this far. Why not just keep going?

This year, it's as good a pep talk as any.

Fredagsbarn

The exterminator says he'll come back. Monday, 7 am. Clear out everything. I spend my mornings scouring the tiles, throwing gargantuan insects out the window, what is a life in New York if not an unending eyeroll at the great joke at our expense. I sit in the car for an hour and a half sweating, block after block of drivers in cars, running out the clock, staring into eternity. Time is only an illusion until it shows up on your skin. He buzzes in your periphery but your heart is hardened, there's a to-do list inside your eyelids and you haven't time for dead end streets pulling on your strings. 

Tomorrow a new leaf turns. 

What that means is entirely up to you.

Oceans Rising

A hurricane appears on the horizon, crying wolf at the coastline. New Yorkers remain unruffled, checking their liquor stores and leaning back. You think we haven't seen worse? The storm loses interest and veers off toward New England, tossing a few thousand buckets of water in our general direction. 

For an entire day, I do not leave the bed. I stretch long limbs to collect new books, rogue pens, switch sides to find the what little light seeps from between the storm clouds, step gingerly onto the leaning floor to refill the coffee cup. It should be a dream but it is steeped in the last words of broken hearts, convoluted by the shreds of old wounds stuck in the spokes. The day runs away, the weekend, the season, drowned in a monsoon, a pandemic, a soul too lost to ever have had hope in finding its way. Monday morning arrives. 

That's all there is to say about it.

Echo Park

Wake early, pummel through the day, everything is a list of to-dos, everything is hamster wheels you spent a life time avoiding. Late at night, warm Friday night in New York City, I run along the river and remember poetry in my veins, remember purpose in the dark silence. There's a spontaneous dance party in the amphitheater. New Yorkers will not relent. He says he's coming through the city and you wonder what it means to steal moments. 

This decade doesn't give you any moments,
you see,

so you do what you can 

with the sticky fingers

you made yourself in the fire.

Alternate Side Parking

It's funny how you fight so hard to escape some claws, and then once they are behind you, it's impossible to remember their grasp. You turn the mechanics over in your hand, watch the metal gears crumble at your touch, how did this street mean so much once? Your eyes? I move the car and the exterminator comes to seal the cracks in your armor, we take this whole life one day at a time. This morning I read a passage that tasted like magic and only later realized I had written it. Sometimes this whole life surprises us. 

Mostly it comes in fits and spurts. 

(This is the first day of my life, he says, but you think every day is the first day, really, and shouldn't you make it memorable? I read another passage, look out the window, watch a full moon rise over the Lower East Side. Think that's exactly it and call it a day. Miracles so rarely announce themselves in fireworks. You mostly know they've been there by the scent that lingers when they've left.)

Upsell

My arm aches. I have stopped looking for the mouse, he will appear if he will, I leave my fate in his hands. We drink two bottles of wine in the rambly parts of the West Village, the world may be crumbling but it never didn't need unconditional friendships. I bike home drunk, but not so drunk that I don't feel the cool air on my face, not so drunk that at every intersection I don't look up and down the avenues to feel the monuments of New York City burst in my chest. 

People have stopped asking about my writing. Poetry lies in piles around my desk, it's a fine home for any rodent if you think about it. I used to think about the immensity of life and now I only ever seem to think of its restrictions. My mother has her last visit to the hospital, they celebrate her with balloons when she goes, it's hard to wrap one's head around it. Is something coming out of this year with joy? These questions are all too scattered, these words like post-its on the floor, my nephew walks in to his kindergarten class and we are never so aware of the years passing as when the childrn grow. Best, perhaps, not to have any then. 

My arm aches. I feel the ceasefire tenuous in my limbs, the stillness vibrating like a fine wire under tension, like I must grasp this tender moment before it is too late but I am frozen still.

You know those dreams where the ghosts are chasing you, and you try to run but move nowhere, your muscles burning and your chest like a weight?

Yeah.

Like Glue

I declare war on the mouse. Spend hours clearing out hidden corners and lining the kitchen with traps, eliminate even the smallest crumb from every surface. But the truth is he has already won, because at every moment am I not thinking of him? With every creak in the old tenement, do I not crane my neck to find any shadow of movement along the floorboards? Ghosts will kill us when the actual monsters never could.

The neighbor upstairs and I speak about it in the stairwell, after I have interrupted her uncomfortable first date goodbyes at the front door, another pest she couldn't get rid of. We are all just trying our best to make it through another day in one piece. I went to a street in Brooklyn and heard myself say this place has changed so much since I lived here but by now it's been 12 years since I did, and did you not think the world would move on? In 16 days, it will be 15 years since I first came here. He says I guess you're a real New Yorker now, and I don't know how to tell him I've had this conversation so many times before that it can no longer hurt me. I am not, without this city, and on its streets, I am everything; you think your rule book can take that from me?

It occurs to me that I am arguing with myself. 

There was less of that when you were here. But I don't think it matters anymore. 

You're not here now. And I still am. 

Who else am I supposed to talk to?

Inside

The vacation wisdom runs off you like dirt in the shower. Except this was insight you wanted to hold on to. The heatwave boils and burns around the brick buildings, the summer wastes away underneath me. I read old stories, try to remember what New York used to be, who I used to be. It's buried deep, now, so deep, and I think I haven't dared to mourn the loss. 

These words are only placeholders. 

That's sort of the state of things
in general.

Returns.

For days I do not see the mouse. I begin to clear its ghosts from the periphery of my vision, begin to believe the hardwood floors are mine. And then there he is again, late Friday night scampering boldly across the entirety of the livingroom floor, I wake with a start. 

The week has been too quick, asking too much of the air in my lungs, plucking the strings from my tenuous connections. I park dangerously close to fire hydrants and spend the day with a slight crick in my neck. The heatwave crests in the late afternoon, a hundred and two degrees and the building smells like a curling iron left on too long. When I deliver the work I am not happy. It is never enough. You are determined to find out what could be. 

Tomorrow you move the car. Take it from there. 

Arms

The mouse refuses capture, leaves a trail of unmistakable calling cards but hides in the heat of the day, you wonder if the upstairs neighbor killed him after all. Her manicured expressions don't suit the ramshackle wood staircase between your apartments, this cramped stairwell that breathes Lower East of old, you loved it at first glance, and she jars the view. She is now on first name basis with the exterminator. You hope the neighborhood chews her up and sends her to Murray Hill in due time. It is your most scathing review. The heatwave climbs up your window, sweating against the poorly sealed panes, he writes from under a starry sky and wishes you were there but the words all blur together, the names, the wondering pairs of eyes. 

It's okay
I know someday I'm gonna be with
you

but the didn't spell out the terms
of the contract and
I don't know if I'm upholding my end of the bargain.

Clean

(I do not own the timing, the way the words choose to come out, when they are ready. The evening is late when I feel the clarity, when I know it is time. I sit down and suddenly everything makes sense, by the time I finish I never want to sleep, I want to only keep writing, I never want to leave this corner of my shoebox, where the papers pile, the post-its reign and rain, where the books build walls and they look more like shelter. It was never that I didn't want to do it, it's that it wanted to do it right. He sends the silence to cover your borough, but you fill the voids with words, with curlicue lyrics for broken songs and you know you've never felt better than in the late, still nights of ink in your veins. You open a window and find the Alphabet City night quiet, the asphalt sweating after the thunderstorm, summer still wild and alive, you, a little too.)

Vermouth

Outside the window, the sky turns black as the thunder rolls in. You haven't left the apartment all day, now it seems too late. You cancel plans to cross the boroughs, run your fingertips across someone else's question marks, dive into work instead and wonder how the twists of words may soothe what ails you. The summer disappears under your feet, the life disappears behind your eyelids, four days in the Pennsylvania woods run from your skin like a monsoon. 

There's an answer somewhere in these depths. 

I'll find it
if it so kills me.

Ist Ave

Returns are tenuous, you wonder what lessons may remain. The parkway moves like a river, you find a parking spot down the block, everything is too easy. The rain calms the city, leaves you with plenty of air to breathe. This morning I walked along the Hudson and felt a slight ache tear at me, but now I feel no regret, no longing. 

I got the presents that were mine to open. 

Now I must put them to use, lest they evaporate in my hands. 

Strung

Wind down country roads toward the river, thick, majestic river to which all roads lead, there’s a mountain pass near Cairo (pronounced care-o, if you know) where you shoot straight out of the foliage into an endless panorama that you could not have expected. I meander into the small hudson valley town just before the community pool closes, sign in on the printed register, swim a lap in the pool to let the 90 degree heat evaporate, summer is endless if you let it.

Just remember these truths are hard won.

Keep them, even when the steam has turned to mist in the sky beyond. 

Turns

Another day ends, you are no longer so exhausted that your eyes slip off the pages you try to read. You have finished three books thus far, the first one feels a lifetime ago on a cold morning porch with a cup of coffee although you think, if you try hard enough, it was only yesterday. I write a laundry item list of things I have discovered, as though fearful I will forget them when I drive out of these woods. 

The truth is I’ve only discovered that which I already knew. 

It seems cruel for life to require so much time and money for us to only ever rediscover. Our therapists may disagree. I spend an hour watching the bullfrog disappear and reappear in the sludge. Later, my skin will stretch taut at surprise sunburn. I haven’t looked in a mirror in days. I turn off the scratchy radio just to test out silence. Who am I against a void? What remains when your flawed coping mechanisms are pulled from under you? 

I make another fire. Take another walk. Stare at the way sunlight trickles in through a deciduous forest. The heavy cotton inside my skull begins to subside. I write another poem. 

This one has a line I quite like in it. 

Retreat

By day three, I have stopped bringing a swimsuit to the jetty. There is no one there to care if I wear one or not. An emerald green frog sits half submerged in the sludge near the reeds,waiting for lunch. The dragonflies are delirious with sunlight. I count freckles on my shoulder in an exercise of patience. 

The boom box in the cabin only finds one station on the FM band, country music with just a hint of static. A dragonfly gets caught in the spiderweb on the jetty ladder. You know you shouldn’t interfere but you cannot help it. The water smells like mulch on your skin. 

I forget my phone and do not miss it. 

Defense

There is no wi-fi. The phone buoys one bar across the treetops, I do not bring the laptops out of their bags for two days. Bury myself in typewritten sheets of poetry. To write again after a hiatus, they say, is an exercise in faith. I write new poems, hopeful strings of words lost in the woods. Intermittently, the old boom box finds a scratchy country station. It speaks of community colleges, fireworks outlets, repeats melodies of carefree summers and heartbreak in local dive bars. You wonder if country singers live with their head in the clouds, or if New Yorkers live with theirs in the ground. 

In the book you read, a young girl drowns just off a Red Hook pier. 

You carry on swimming in the forest pond and there's a word for this kind of water in your home language that can never be translated. The word contains the likeliness that there is no bottom, that woodland spirits may drag you under, that the silence of a forest is a warning cry and you dive in anyway. When you married another tongue, you relinquished your unconditional faith in the magic of language, everything became open for investigation. Words became only words. 

You became determined to spend your life recapturing the intangible magic. Becoming the woodland creature come to take your readers' imagination away. You wonder if the witches they used to burn at the stakes weren't simply women who had discovered something beyond tragic gray doldrums of being some man's property. He writes to call you pretty and you think he doesn't know the half of what fire lies below. 

I stir a stick through the embers, wait for the last to die down before leaving the pit, mosquitoes delirious with warm flesh in the August twilight. 

It occurs to me I thought I was dying
when really I was only lost,
when really I had only tied myself to the stake
and refused to light a match.

Table Rock

Arrive in the late afternoon, Pennsylvania like a postcard of future foliage tours to come and the cashier at Wegmans decrying updated CDC guidelines. The host shows me round the cabin and explains how great the gun laws, you just walk right in and get your gun, but the lake is yours and the woods are yours and the silence, blissfully, is yours, so you just nod. When he leaves, you walk to the jetty and take all your clothes off, dive off the spider webbed ladder into quiet waters and when you come back up it’s as if you’ve forgotten everything that came before. 

I do not pretend to come to the woods without intention, do not pretend vacation is a break without a goal. But today I spent half an hour staring at a fire, twirling marshmallows on a stick and marveling how age lets you wait a little longer, turn those white puffs around slower as they swell until they reach that perfect golden crackle, instead of setting them on fire and pretending you like em real crisp. 

Some things have changed, some things have gotten better. You’d do well to remember that, when the embers die down and all that’s left to keep you company

is a mind running full speed 

on empty. 

Little Island

You do not have the words before they come to you
They are not yours to demand out of
nothing

Today I closed and wrapped and tied
neatly with a bow, let
his soft silence be the last
sounds on my lips, see
the sun set across the Hudson,
know
that tomorrow the road lies open ahead
and everything that appears
in its wake 

is mine.

Re-enter

The woman sits down next to you, smells of a life without showers, mumbles quietly to herself in a language you do not understand. She brushes dirt off her pants, it falls into the bags around her. You could’ve stayed, in a different life perhaps you would have stayed, but you wanted the gentle rocking of a subway train after midnight, wanted that slow moment of quiet with your city, put words to wordless breaths. The train rolls in, leaves the woman at the station, her mask diligently on. She stares at the ground. 

He touches your collarbone and you think some bones will always be broken even after they heal. He asks about a wink in your eye and you wonder if the caverns carved into your chest will remain dark and unknowable forever. 

The mouse has returned, scampered across the kitchen counter when I caught it unawares. The Empire State beams its translucent light down to the streets. I bike the last of the way home, cool summer breeze in my hair and all the noise silent around me, 12th street like a secret. 

You could stay

You should stay

How long will you hold your breath?

Show Yourself

Wake early from strange dreams, unfamiliar faces with a familiar feeling in their skin linger along your fingertips, everything comes up poetry. Disorienting to rise, but unsurprising. Swallow your hope and carry on, awaiting the storm, awaiting the inevitable drops. He asks how do you live as a writer in New York and the only answer I can think of is poor. But when he asks why do you do it, you begin talking and do not come up for air until the Nolita crowd has grown young and the Bowery rowdy, you stare into distant starscapes and feel the blood in your veins soften, your spine align. The mouse does not appear for days but you are patient. 

You know a really good story
takes time to tell.

It’s Just Begun

Weekday night on spring street, a cool breeze through unruffled trees, I’ve stood in the Atlantic Ocean and watched wave after wave approach me and pass to shore, have stood against or been swept up, have wondered at perpetual motion and how we all turn to grains of dust in the end. 

The ocean swallows you whole. 

You hold your breath. Prepare to open your eyes. 

Are You Feeling Nervous?

I set more traps, try to anticipate moves and be one step ahead of a rodent brain, keep expecting the sound of guillotines when none are to come. I pack my bag. 

There was a time when every day did not begin in a brace, a time when mornings arrived with sore limbs and easy smiles, but it's hard to remember it now. How light a spirit can be, how heavy. 

The problem with taking this
one day at a time

is eventually you
will run out of days.

the Ocean's Rising

The insects are back, filling your insides with their scattering legs, their nervous fluttering of wings. They multiply in your gut, straining the tissue that holds you intact, tearing at your seams in frantic attempts at escape. 

Maybe they aren't trying to get out at all. Maybe they enjoy the cramped existence, the constant pecking reminder that they are alive. 

You wish they'd keep their reminds to themselves. 

I took a long walk along the river this morning, in dogged determination to live, some days I think this blind stubbornness is all that remains in my pocket. When you jumped off that bridge on New Years morning, all I could think was you were so determined to die, there was nothing anyone could have done to stop you, the mouse evades all my traps at night, it knows better. 

I know better. 

The cabin host writes again. Is it just you? 

The insects laugh. Dare you to open your mouth.

Bug

The little mouse comes out to test the waters, imperceptible darts from under the stove, feet so light you cannot hear them but my peripheral vision has been honed by years of New York tenement living, I know it before I know it. We make plans for drinks, he slides that sliver of hope into his intonation and you wonder if you'll ever remember what that feels like when it vibrates against your vocal cords. I turn around and book a cabin in the woods instead. There's no wi-fi, the host writes, but sometimes if you go back to the road there's one bar of cell service. 

I set a crown of mouse traps around the apartment. Bait them with a light at the end of the tunnel. 

Turn around and wait
for morning.

Like Humbug

Days disappear under piles of uselessness. The New York City Summer carries on underneath your thumb, or perhaps the opposite is true, what disaster your ragged bones continue to be. I bike home late in the night, drunk but not happy, weary but not tired. The days continue, as they will, one after another, refusing to veer off course. Friendly faces pass by, trying to gauge the color of your eyes, check your pulse, carry on.

You attempt to do the same. 

The illness lingers in your blood stream, hides in dark corners, converses with the demons. 

You arrange your firewood, collect the kindling. 

Wonder how much will burn in this next attempt to smoke it out.

Tusen Bitar

12th street lay quiet in a Thursday night, the ait soft, I fly east across a hundred avenues, New York is a dream if you want it. 

A mouse has moved into my kitchen. When I come home, it sleeps. Waits for a moments peace before it will step out, claim the world as its own. 

Likewise, little noise. Likewise.  

Bowl

The oppressive afternoon collapses, one loud smack of thunder clearing the smoke fiiled air, the reminder of raging fires and how those who hate your city will never understand the things you’ve seen. The summer evening is cool, endearing. We sit in the bookshop café in the sidewalk seating, New York City transformed by crisis and opportunity. It’s hard to understand the changes while they’re happening.

We never sat in the street before.

A story unfolds at my fingertips, all youthful infatuation and poetic haze. You wonder if memory fails you, but the words, when you read them, ring true. Fifteen years ago you came to this city with stars in your eyes and the truth is they never went out. The truth is you’ve been making your wishes on them ever since and if someone gave you the choice you wouldn’t change a thing.

I know the days are hard, sometimes, are impossible to endure and the life seems a punishment for crimes you did not commit, but here’s the thing. You wake up in the morning to the sound of a heart on fire, you write your words on a canvas that never hurt you, only ever loved and burned and vibrated around you. The truth is you made a deal with the devil years ago and when you really stop to count your pennies, you have not regretted it once.

There was somewhere else I thought perhaps I should be, someone else I thought perhaps I could love, but I was only ever kidding myself. I have loved you since the day we first met, have loved you for 15 years, am blissfully ruined for anyone else. 

Will hold this heart on fire
until I am but ash
on your streets.

the Bell Jar

I'm writing a novel, I said. I haven't got time to change into this and change into that. 

Monday morning rages in behind my eyelids, shouts to do lists and a terrified request at a mind uncluttered by its own illnesses down my throat. I have pulled down all the blinds, the room dark, there's a short space before your superego truly wakes when you can feign recovery, try to run into the day with that shred and keep the demons at bay.

The demons do not worry. 

They have played the long game before and know their sinewy limbs will outlast your fits and spurs, gleeful hunter-gatherers on the savannah of your own lifespan. 

But isn't this just the thing? When all the veneer is stripped away, when your socially acceptable pretenses are taken from you and you are left standing naked, panting, reduced to only your meager truths, do they not seem blissfully uncluttered? Does it not become clear what you are meant to do?

When you stop running,
do you not find that you can

set those demons on
fire?

On

 The point is

You come up for air

sometimes 

But nobody 

Can actually make you

Breathe  

Busted Tooth

I took a deep breath and
listened to the old brag of my heart.  

I am, I am, I am.

Thread

Too many days have passed. 

You know. 

You know what words those days pass in the silences
(You know silence is never good,
not for you,
not for what you are running from)

This is no space for poetry

about what might have been. 

Some days you are just trying to make it to the end of the chapter.
on those days, that¨ll do.

Tread

You dig yourself out of the darkness, little crumbs of oxygen, such a sad moment's breath but you take it. Look over the reams of paper in your wake, have the time to think things are worse than I suspected  before they are swept under the rug. You see, the words do not lie, even when they twist and dance in such pleasant curlicues, even when they seem to give meaning to the black soot that covers your every cell. Look over previous edits, see desperate scribbles in the margins, a mad man's clinging to sanity, crossed out on the next page with steady ink, saying the word will be worth it. We've seen this film before, know it doesn't end well. This narrative doesn't ride off into the sunset. This narrative is inner monologue into oblivion. 

I woke up last night in the middle of a thunderstorm, my hand on the windowsill and the lightning like it was in the room with me. Torrents of rain met the earth, explosions shaking the brick building around me, I could not go back to sleep. I could not be mad. 

These storms are inevitable, are as much a life as the shallow breath in your lung, are yours to bear. You carry them unconditionally. 

This does not mean you carry them without fear
they will bury you
at last.

Hold

You cancel your tickets. 

A whole life of running,
it's hard to know
what is freedom
and what is simply
the fear 

that stopping means
the wave will catch you

that it will drown you
at last.

Set

How life is a constant rush of waves to shore, a series of forceful tumbles into grating ocean floors and relentless, desperate kicks up to the top of a crest, never fully reaching any goal before being mercilessly dragged back out by your own volition. How the drop is inevitable, how the involuntary determination to return to surface is consistent. I sat in a Williamsburg bar making jokes while my spine held its breath, how these moments of reprieve are short and incomplete. 

I return to the island limping, glimmers of hope quickly extinguished by this weight in my lungs. Ask the Universe for aid but all my asks are misguided: what I am looking for is not for the Universe to give. 

There is a moment in every hero's journey tale where our crusader meets the rocks at the bottom, is finally so defeated and broken that all hope seems lost. We expend our last breath waiting for the protagonist to find that little remaining spark within, that most human need to go on at every cost, to prove oneself to the mocking gods, we cheer when the spark is caught and propels this stand-in for our own struggles forward, upward, into blissful redemption and hard-earned triumph. This is the way we demand the story goes, this sates our agitation. But the story doesn't linger in the dark. 

Doesn't tell you how long you may need to endure the bottom,
how long you must hold your breath before you'll know how to get back to the top.

Suburbia

When I turn the light out, I am nowhere. The silence is so deep it hums in my ears. The darkness is so black that my eyes forget how to see. The suburban night is a mystery, sprinklered lawns and hidden parkways, I am thrown off by the peaceful ride along the Hudson, this is not where I belong. New York floods and I want to drown in it, an honest New Yorker is the kindest person you’ll meet, take this bedroom community pleasantries away from me. 

Everything will be okay in the end. 

You make it through, one conviction at a time. 

Purge

The day after eruption is peaceful, but fraught. Your insides feel like after a great illness, ravaged, frayed. There's no buffer to protect against the demands of a day, I am soft. She asks how I'm doing, and my answers are tentative, hesitant. I throw some bags on a bike and weave through post-stormed streets to Grand Central, take quiet steps to a train seat -- forward-facing, riverside. How the Hudson always calms your fired turmoil. But it's more complicated now, not so easily accepted, not so quickly forgotten.

You begin to wonder if the trick is not to outrun your demons. 

You begin to suspect the truth in fact is that you are them.

Prologue

At last the disorienting tumult of the strange jet lag wears off. I wake early, before the most oppressive heat has built itself across the grid and walk along the river in a hazy awareness. A life sheds itself from my insides, casts off into oblivion and leaves it to me to rebuild, again, again, again. My teeth have stopped hurting. 

The little girl at the end of the cursor languishes. She should be grown by now, but malnourishment steals the years from her. I'm stealing the years from both of us. We do not have the choice to rebuild, to start anew elsewhere. I gave myself all the fertile soil I could find, was it not enough? We are withering under my thumb. 

She writes to say if I have this baby, then I no longer have an out.

And it's unclear if she means it
as a blessing
or a curse.

Ache

The aging body creaks, sends cries for help through red-hot nerve endings to which I cannot listen. The suffocating heart moans but turns away at slightest recognition. The super is drunk in the street again, playing Whitney Houston on the sidewalk and you don't have it in you to face him. A few days ago, a massage therapist pushed on knots so tightly coiled around themselves that they protected my every last bone from feeling a thing, now I am all feeling and each one of them hurts. The severe thunderstorm watches follow each other but all we get is oppressive heat, everything comes out like crooked poems. He writes from the desert, words to try to rearrange, look for hidden meaning, try to hear it differently but not sure what you are looking for. Recognize this body in the mirror not as a person you wanted to escape, but as an infection that had its hooks in you for too long - read that again - you are not your illnesses. 

The heat rolls across the ceiling like a weight. You haven't moved an inch. What might these limbs say if given the platform? He writes to say all the nothings that can fit in a space before your hypochondria kicks in and you strain to get out. It's not that many nothings. You procrastinate another deadline and watch the days disappear from under you, the life. 

If only I wasn't so tired, you hear yourself say. 

But what does it matter?

You are.

Heat wave

Another heat wave rolls in, slows the pace on the sidewalks, the asphalt melting into a sticky goo, holding you briefly with each step, asking do you really want to go to the place where you are going? I try to rise early, but jet lag buries me for hours, I wander around the shoebox that is my home and cannot remember what it is to feel. He says te adoro while you shed another layer of cloying affection from your rib cage, ignorantly indifferent. You know this iteration too well. Build layers of buffering distance instead, try to remember what it was like when you wanted. 

This time is yours,
you know. 

It is up to you what you make of it.

Independence

But then a few hours later, with the day well under way and the cars amassing in the veins,
I crest a hill to see Manhattan spread out before me,
and I take a breath so deep I didn't know my lungs had been empty all this time. 

Returning to New York City after a time away is like seeing in color after
settling for black and white.
It's turning the brightness up on your dimmer lights, it's
a buzz in your skin that you never again want to lose.

I drove alongside the island, watching it undulate from the Brooklyn shore,
and thought only I love you, I love you, I love you, and when
they tell me I should perhaps learn to be satisfied, or settle, or build a life of good enough,
I will remind them that if a person, place, or thing does not sit like a deep breath in your chest and
a smile in your heart,
it would be a dishonor to our lives to stay with them.

This city taught me what love is, and now
I never have to accept any less.

Zenith

(I lay on the deck tonight,
perfect July temperatured
summer night in the American West, 

listening to the steady chirp of the crickets,
the relentless silence of the Great Land, 

watching stars shoot across the sky
(not really stars, we know, but we do not
question)

and thought,

I have no wishes to make,
I have nothing to ask for,
I am happy.

and I have not felt so at peace
so Whole, 

in many years. 

Not like I was making it through. 

Like I had not been broken to begin with.)