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.