Nolita

You take a late train home from Atlantic, nothing running like it should and your breath like a cold cloud escaping from your lips, but when you climb that bridge to Manhattan, does it not expand in your lungs like a tonic? Step out at Grand Street, skip across icy Chinatown crosswalks, see the Empire State building peek through the ends of the avenues like whispered reminders of what you come home to. 

How do you explain the feeling of landing at the edge of the Manhattan skyline, to someone whose heart is ice?

He says he doesn't need to speak to references, says These are the cute keys, says the radiator is set to the Spanish Flu, and you know just what he means. You send him a deposit instantly and take the keys before you go. Sometimes you think the things you know do not fit on this island, do not fit in the realm of his embrace, could not be contained in a myopic love. But you don't yet know how to put that into the words of someone who doesn't listen in poetry. 

So you let it drift around like dust bunnies in whirlpool breezes, wait patiently for the sentences to align, make no questions that you have no interest in answering, at the end of this cobblestone street is the Empire State Building, at the end of all your steps is a city that still tingles in your hair after all these years, at the end of this story you still made a home in the one place that made sense, if that isn't poetry, 

you don't know what is.