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?