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.)

Overcast

The desert continues its cool ascent across the days, surprising in its raindrops, in its rich greens and careful silence. I make another pot of coffee, revel in the expanses of time, let my mind wander. Watch the chickens dig through the earth with nothing more pressing to do than find the next gnat, wander through the potato plants, make the most of the summer. Do you remember when everything had broken and I borrowed your school bus to drive into the mountains and forget everything that didn't matter and what remained was tidal waves of words? 

I think I've been discovering and re-discovering the answer for years, it continues to be the same, an unmovable answer while I run and run in search of something easier to believe in, but isn't this answer the easiest of all, simply because it is true? 

Your convictions are no less worthy
just because they seem impossibly out
of reach.

Mira

Summer evenings in the desert carry a certain scent, you can feel it on your cheeks, they're all middle school sleepovers and cicada soundtracks to watching the stars fall from a friend's deck, all milkshakes at the diner and do you remember how time was going to last forever? I broke my heart against summer evenings, time and time again I let the soft voices of young men grow the song in my chest until I believed the futures they'd become, and oh, how the rift bled in my chest when they walked away. 

I sat on the back steps looking for stars through the cloud cover, the summer evening quiet, do you remember how time was going to last forever and now all we have left is poetry, I cling to it like fear clings to the back of your breath. In New York, the roiling heat wave disappears in a monsoon. I pack my bags in anticipation. 

Wonder how long it takes for a heart to heal.