Stranger

The afternoon disappears in a haze. I find myself at the old bookstore, in a neighborhood where I used to live, find myself sinking into a thick leather armchair that reminds me that if I am not allowed in this country, I am always right in this town. 

A woman next to me offers to give me a tarot reading, like she can sense the electricity buzzing around my head. I say no. The attractive man across from me looks terrified, but processes slowly before declining. The last girl at the table says yes; we all listen in to the promises of her future. I'm getting the strong feeling that you should go for it, says the woman. 

I wonder if nonsense of this moment could lead to a meet-cute with the attractive man, his squinting eyes like a secret to unwrap. But he doesn't see the electricity either, doesn't pick up the tendrils I'm letting out into the Universe. I wonder how loud I have to vibrate for the Universe to catch up, for people to catch on, and then I hear him ask me if he's seen me here before. The Universe giggles in my direction. 

At last I walk out of the bookstore, a giggle and a half but no number in my pocket, reminded that attractive doesn't make up for a brain you don't want to unwrap, that a sense of humor would have made him look good not just today but in 50 years. My friend awaits. A cocktail awaits. Don't you understand I have pockets full of magic, I cannot wait for you

to catch up. 

Ellis Island

So many doors, so many mazes to get where you are going. You wait for longer than you thought you would before you are led into the little room. It all happens so fast you barely have time to be scared anymore. When it’s over, she smiles and says it all went so well and you breathe a sigh of relief until she says But I cannot make a decision right now. In 1999 you drove too fast and there’s no way to prove that that’s all it was. 

Back outside all the doors, in the cold winter wind, a cop says I see you smilin all the way up the block, and you don’t know if you should tell him all tha passed in the moments before you met him. 

Life is strange, and long, and short all at once. One step at a time. A friend calls and asks if you’ll meet for lunch. Says we’ll go somewhere with strong drinks. At the end of the day, your pockets are full of gifts. 

Snap

I'm deep in shivasana when I hear it. Slow breaths, muscles settling and letting go of the day, a peaceful winding down to sleep. Silence. 

And then, for just a second, a sharp sound not afforded the padding of traveling in through the windows. Something from within the walls. Just that quick snap, nothing else, no lingering sensation. Something was here, now it is not. 

I close out my reverie, gather my being inside my body again. Walk to the kitchen, unthinking. 

In the corner of the room, in the little gap between the kitchen counter and the crooked wall, a mouse trap lies sideways, released. The trespasser perfectly captured in a square, its soft body draped across the pad, eyes wide, pleading, its long tail still. A New Yorker is forever at war with the mouse, but it is no less of a life, no less of a heartache to witness the results of battle. The death quiets me. 

As it should. 

Cygnes

A quiet day passes. Not even the mouses stirs, and you wonder what else you should be doing. The appointment in the calendar continues to wave its flags in your direction, you weave around it like a cat on a hot tin roof, never not aware it's there. 

The story begins to fall apart at your fingertips, you question your abilities, the youth in your veins. It's been too many years since everything seemed possible. 

You've reached a point where all you aim to do is 
survive. 

Slush

A page turns in the almanac, a new month, a step closer to spring. The snow recedes from the flower pot on the fire escape, the small body of a dead mouse resurfacing, reminding itself to you. Life is so frail, so fleeting, when you see it on the other side. Death doesn't scare you so much as soften you. There's a gift in there, perhaps, but it is hard to look directly at it. 

The week ahead intimidates you. There's a date in the calendar, an appointment in the books, and you cannot look away from it, cannot distract yourself with tasks closer at hand. There may be no way around it. The only way out is through. 

You were raised to know right from wrong, and to do the right. That doesn't go away just because the woods get dark. You were raised in the woods, raised to know there was always a way out. You see a new year open up before you, see opportunity and potential in the paperweights of the world, see the sheets of paper unravel and fly around you. There's a surrealist air to the brush strokes, a Daliesque quality to your tumble down the rabbit hole. All your best stories were written in madness, in wonder. Why should this year be any different? 

The remaining mouse scampers across the kitchen floor while you sleep. 

If you didn't know better, you'd think he was inviting you along.  

Chill

The mornings were never for storytelling, you let yourself admit, albeit reluctantly. Your mind was never able to wander like it needs to, you're not sure why you keep banging your head against this Lutheran wall. You try to eke out a few words but they fall flat. In the evening, you chase another mouse across the floor, despair turns to murderous rage and when the deed is done you crumple into yourself. 

Cannot imagine what it would take to do this to another human. 

The neighborhood remains snowed in, piles of white gathering an icy sheen, it's impossible to traverse the obstacles at the end of each block. The ice thickens in the Buttermilk Channel, the air tingles with deep winter, but the sun beams down on your pale skin like a homing beacon, like it's telling you it's still here. Your cousin sends reels from her favorite restaurant a few stops up on the ferry, says What I wouldn't give to see you there. Sometimes you are reminded, 

everything you ever wanted
is here.  

Run and Run

For a day, I am confined to bed. Every step on the creaking wood floor sets off a vertigo without explanation, it owns your body and you've nothing to do but relent. There's some sort of lesson in there, but you are too far gone to read it. 

The day after illness is always a gift. Bright sunshine beams down the east-facing streets of Brooklyn, ice floes lapping the little beach at the edge of the neighborhood. I take every step in full pleasure, indulging in the way the light charges my skin, the way the cool air soothes my brow, the way a body was meant to stretch and exert. The gift lies in renewed potential, in the feeling of blank slates and white pages. It is not lost on you. 

The sun shines, the world begins. 

You may as well do
the same. 

Monday Bar

Stepping it out in Manhattan, I am reminded at once how the storms look different in the city, all narrow canyons of footsteps cutting through the sidewalk fortifications, all slushy, brown rivers and impatient walkers, all grit in the face of adversity. A man tries to unbury his car on Houston, a monumental task three days in the making, at least. 

The hardware stores are all out of shovels. My car will have to wait until the spring. 

I make my way to the writing bar, and the bartender beams at my arrival. No one else has made it out yet. We spend an hour weaving around the stories of the last week, a routine that took years to build and which you never want to let go. This is how you build New York. Borrow a cup of sugar. Help an old lady across the street. Build a living room in a bar down the street. This is how you build yourself into New York. 

You've done so many things wrong,
it feels like,

But at least this one time you did something 
right.  

And After the Storm

I wake in the middle of the night, radiator straining, street silent, and think immediately only of how to dig my car out of the piles. Later, my morning walk cuts short from trudging through so many blocks of unshoveled snow; I want to appreciate the pristine, paper-sharp hue of its white but find myself frustrated, sweating at the exertion. Yesterday's magical wonderland awe is replaced with a hardness I don't like in myself. They say the temperatures will plummet all week, but it's not that. It's that you gave yourself one day of simply existing in the moment of each snowflake, of looking not beyond and not further inside, but just at the crystal dendrites of each snowflake as it tumbles to the ground: solitary, at first, unique, then indistinguishable in a sea of snow cover. There's a metaphor in there somewhere.

And maybe that's why the morning after is heavy.  

Tea

You wake too early, six a.m. and the borough is still dark, still quiet. Like a dog lying in wait, your cough springs to life at your open eyelids, it is too late to pretend you are still asleep. Turn on the string of lights winding around your houseplants, let yourself linger in bed. Walk to the pier just as the sun rises, watch orange of the Staten Island ferry streak across the Statue of Liberty, a plane descending to Newark beyond. 

There was a time when every airplane you saw in the sky made you long to fly away. When every departure was a reminder that you were going nowhere. I don't feel that way anymore. 

It occurs to you that maybe some breaks can be mended, some chasms can be filled. It occurs to you that maybe you're doing better 
than you think.  

Thursday morning

You try to write, try to wrangle your brain into the right whimsy for words but the mornings were never your moment, never invited you to dive into the depths. You step around them, cautious, uninterested, unsure what to make of the swirls that lie silent in the corners of the room. Perhaps we are allowed to just wait it out. They say there's a storm coming, and you wonder if it could blanket your fever, silence what ails you. It's a big ask, and you know it. 

Put the words away. This is not their moment. 

Come back to them when darkness ignites your spark,
again.

Cough

The temperature plummets, and the old radiators get to work, you apartment is at once freezing and scalding hot, it is the way it has always been, is there not comfort in predictability? Your lungs turn themselves inside out, some new ailment caught in the cross breeze, you feel it creep into your body like ink diluted in a water glass, soon it will be in your every detail. Just like the devil.

The world is on fire, it's too hard to close your mind to that and look only to your own work, too hard to pretend it doesn't eat you from the inside. 

And perhaps that is the point. 

We're not meant to pretend the world isn't falling apart around us. 

We're meant to see it
and let it make us work that much harder
to fix what we can.  

Freeze

The weather app tells you it's four degrees, but the genes at the back of your spine tell you it's sunny, tell you about layers, remind you how you were made for this, and soon you are traversing the snow crust, coffee in hand, face tilted toward the sun. Maybe there are better ways to survive a winter, but you're not convinced. 

You stayed late at the writing bar, familiar faces trickling in, the bartender happy for company on such a quiet night, we joke about doing cartwheels across the floor, you feel like you've earned this living room away from home, the gift is not lost on you. Walking home, crossing the blackened park, the scent of deposited Christmas trees like a treat to your senses, you think how things can be good without being magic. It took you too many decades to learn. 

(It doesn't mean you're not keeping your eyes open. 
If the magic comes, you'll want to see it.) 

One hundred years over

We're making a fucking 15-second commercial for fucking Arby's, he says. We're not saving the world, calm down. You love listening in to other patrons at the bar, quiet Monday and mostly regulars, there's an easy comfort to the little room. The bartender exchanges book recommendations with the guy by the window while he waits for his Guinness. She pours a Lagunitas before the young guy in the corner has even stepped up to see her. 

It occurred to you this morning that it's January and you are happy. Occurred to you that there's a lightness in your chest that you haven't been able to take for granted for a while. The world is on fire, but you are alive. You wonder if the world will last until summer, if the plans you make for when the leaves are green again will still be possible then. On the news, a woman in Greenland says they've made an exit plan. My parents and I agreed we'll have to leave them behind. 

You read in history books, as a child, about a world that could never be again, about the monstrosity of humans that had been wiped from the world, that there was a unity now that would carry us into forever. 

That world is gone now. And you have to decide what they will say about you
in the history books of the future.  

Monday

Did we jinx the world
with our optimism?

Each morning seems like a new punishment for
crimes we didn't know we had
committed. 

Or perhaps we were always living on
borrowed time. 

Monday morning stretches and writhes, I wake well before dawn in a sweat, the ancient radiator bucking and weaving under a pressure of its own making. We've all been there, buddy. In my dreams, I am in Africa, I am at a coffeeshop in Italy and only French comes out, I am alone in someone else's big house and worried about intruders, nothing seems to go right. 

But when the pink strokes of dawn wash over the cruise ship in the Buttermilk Channel, and you take your layers of clothing against the deep freeze to walk across the bright white snow crust at the end of the pier, staring straight into the sun as you go, 

It's like you survived a darkness 
and didn't just come out the other side alive
but for a moment, 
for this moment,

Living. 

Snow Day

When you wake, the eastern rooftops are bathed in pink, a sliver of dawn sneaking through the cloud cover. By the time you get back from your morning walk, coffee cold in the mug, the light has turned to snow flakes, fluttering to the ground like they were choreographed to. He writes from years of silence to ask where you are, it's all part of the consistent dance of your respective poetries, little breadcrumb trails of a connection severed too soon, lifelines thrust into the ethers like a warm caress that confirms signs of life but nothing more. You disappear down a rabbit hole of histories, uncover reminders of who you are and how you got here. There was magic in your life, once. 

Surely, there could be again? 

Steam

You wake in the middle of the night, the outside dark and quiet. The radiator reels, a hundred and fifty years of cast iron belching out steam heat to the tenement. A reliable comfort, if a little eager. You move to the living room for reprieve, and oversleep in the railroad room where sunlight doesn't reach come morning. 

Outside city limits, the country begins a slow and steady climb to war. You can sense it, the cornerstones of a nation crumbling at the insistent prodding. It's hard to look at the monsters directly and understand how any of your peers can approve. What do they see when they look at this blaze? The writing on the wall must be smudged in their eyes. 

You walk to the pier, Arctic temperatures blowing through your layers, but the sun bright against your eyelids. A love affair thousands of years in the making.

The words scatter. The days, too. You know this is how it is sometimes, that it'll all arrange itself and come together. There's a spot just inside your open window where the temperatures have found their equilibrium. 

Writing bar

The writing bar remains, even though it is Wednesday, because the bartender wrote you on Monday to say she'd switched her shifts, and you are a sucker for a wink from the city. This bar which is more home now than the place where your keys fit in the door, this bar which has seen you through heartbreak and pandemics and despair and returns. This bar which has earned a place in your liner notes because without it, this manuscript would not be piled high beside you. You allow yourself a moment's catch-up with the bartender, allow yourself a quiet warmth in the orange glow of the light strings, before retreating to that table in the corner where so many of your words came to light. Pull out a manuscript. Look at your words. 

Write a book.  

It's all you're meant to do.  

Chill

You cannot start the day by reading the news, anymore, this habit no longer serves you. The world is too dark, the darkness too real, heartbreak at every turn and when you look back at the decades thinking how could this happen?, well, now you know. 

A fiery sunrise wakes you, Red Hook stretches its limbs like a sleepy hamlet far from the buzz of the metropolis. In a way, it's perfect for you, perpetually on the outside, longing for an in, but also forever looking to escape. You live your life in limbo. And at last, you're letting yourself relish it, instead of thinking it's a state you need to leave. 

There was despair in the world the last time you felt this lightness, you considered its meaning then, too. Now, you can no longer afford to squander the moments on thought. there's a resistance to be made in art, there's a weapon in your arsenal that you are ready to wield. The only time is now.  

The only way out
is through.  

Lunch Box

It doesn't happen all at once, so you're never quite sure when it started. Suddenly you realize that there was a sunrise that winked at you yesterday, that you found forty dollars in the street two weeks ago, that the bartender pulled a few drinks off your tab just before closing. Suddenly you find yourself sitting on an East River ferry smiling, simply because you cannot help yourself. 

Do you remember how we'd see that ferry, with its silly name, back when things were new and the world seemed open to our miracles? Every time I saw it, it felt like a nudge from the Universe. Even after you'd left, I thought, the Universe still sees me, so I am not alone. It passed me today on a Brooklyn pier park, after years of absence, bringing commuters back to Manhattan like it was nothing, like we didn't have a history. Like the Universe had returned from its sojourn to other realms and was again here to let its light shine on me. 

I've been feeling it lately, that buzz, that brightness. I can't explain it, and I don't ask to. The words are simmering again, the life in my veins. 

Hold on tight, my darling
it might just be time to live.  

Homecoming

They've asked you to explain it, and you cannot. If they can scale the Brooklyn Bridge in the afternoon sun, look at all of New York spread out around them, and not feel giggles grow in their chest like bubbles, there's no making them. You cannot apply logic to love

nor should you. 

You climb the four flights to your tenement apartment, clear out remnants of Christmas decorations and construction dust, watch the way the sun sets across the water, how it sets the Manhattan skyscrapers on fire, and you have nothing bad to say about anything. It's been a long time since you felt not just okay, but good. Since you smiled at strangers in the street, since you wished for something bigger than survival. Everything burns around you, but you do not control the sparkle in your chest. It appears at will. You're starting to accept the whims of your life.

As long as the sparkle returns,
sometimes,
you're prepared to live until you 
die.  

Strike

The news gets worse everytime you look at it. You still don't know if that means you should look at it more or stow away completely. Eventually even heads in the sand can be executed, a war doesn't need you to acknowledge it to happen. When you were younger, it was easier to see things as black and white and now suddenly you have your heart in all manner of coals. 

A few years ago, early in a year that still lay unknown before you, you asked the Universe for a change out of your control, for something to shake things up. The year that followed was a nuclear blast to the world as you knew it, the years after like continued fallout, and it was too late to take your wishes back. 

Does that mean you don't wish for things anymore?

It's too long a life
to only get by on
survival. 

Sink

In sleep, your sister finds a charred body in the crowd. You run through an unfamiliar town, looking for an emergency room, but by the time you reach it, the body is reduced to fragments in your hands. 

Is this the end of our Dream?

America, is this correct?  

The morning is mild, I walk down country roads painted in snowmelt, I stop to look at how the sun streams through barren tree branches, it wakes sleeper cells in me, genetic poetry from a life in the North, the stories all revolve around an innate longing to turn toward the sun. Don't tell me not to stare straight into its life-giving force, my eyes were made to absorb it. 

January meanders slowly through the days, as it does, you try to take a page out of its book and place it in your own: meander, slowly, you'll get there eventually so long as you keep walking. 

America, this is quite serious. 

America, I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.  

Unease

The snow thaws, noncommital rain wearing away at it without purpose. You wake with a weight on your chest, your inability to step up to the moment when the moment doesn't move you. This lack of bullheadedness does not serve you like you wish it did. You dream of flying to Africa but being a disaster at check-in, it's just another way of telling you the same thing. 

Get it together. 

But January is as January does. You wake late, your mind a syrup, your bones unable to muster enough oomph to even feel guilt. You dream of walks in the forest, of staring out of a window for hours, you know it won't hold. Perhaps it'll pass. Sit with the discomfort, an older version of you yells but it's no good. The discomfort doesn't want to be sat with, it demands action, attention, demands violence. 

You are weak
You give in

There's always tomorrow,  
you think to yourself,
knowing full well that one day, 

There won't be.  

(Nearly)

It arrives in a whisper, a hesistant stray equal parts curious and wary, 
tiptoeing past your doorstep when you're not paying attention but you 
see it in the corner of your eye 
hear it at the edge of your awareness. 

Just the slightest creak on a floorboard: 
a Word.

So when you sit in the silence, 
you find yourself needing to write a sentence, 
tell a story, 
put a thought to paper, you find yourself
itching 
to live in that world of making sense
through ink on paper, 
making real through 
make-believe, you find 
yourself

Yes, that's it, 
isn't it
You find
yourself.  

In the Snow

You sleep late, the quiet comfort of the upstate like a balm around your senses. What if we had it wrong all along and you don't actually have to suffer first to deserve peace after. It's like you don't know how to just be okay. 

The morning walk is still, snow-covered cemeteries and fresh air, every turn shows another dog out for a walk. You meet a nine-week-old puppy named Noodle. It seems right. You dream of a home now, a peace the kind that will settle in your bones. 

The problem is you've never let anything settle in your bones, so why would you now. 

You begin looking at apartment listings, but it feels like a show. You look to the woods, but it feels like a death sentence. Across the country, your sister becomes someone new. But only on paper. 

When you start looking at what life really is, 
it's not what they told you, at all.  

Shorted

An illness washes over your body, reminds you of your limitations, the flaw of being biology. You're not only in your head, you think. It is an annoying reminder. 

There is magic just beyond the reach of your fingertips, you're sure of it. At night, you dream of running and getting nowhere, you have the time to think that something isn't real about this but can't figure out what it might be. The answers elude you. The only thing you know how to do is sit down at a typewriter to figure it out, so you vow to. 

Again, again, again, I will sit down at these keys, I will wear them down until all that's left is miracle, surely if I stick around something will come of it. These are the repetitions of a writer at the end of their rope, these are the fevered delusions of a madman, but you said you'd give it all away for just a morsel of poetry, did you not? Are these the morsels you bargained for? 

The snowy landscape gives no answer in return. You cannot blame it. January wasn't made for unearthing that which has been buried in the frost. 

North

Red Hook is so quiet on Sunday mornings, lying in rest, a collective agreement to not. The cruise ship lies docked but no one's getting off yet. It's cold. January sunrise. You drag your bags – the same bags you schlepped home from Chelsea last night – back downstairs and down the street, a week's worth of dirty clothes and some leftovers you found in the fridge. The car is ready, waiting. The Brooklyn Bridge gleams in the morning light, the FDR is empty, you're careening among snow-covered trees in no time. Arrive in the old Victorian house before your coffee's even gone cold. The house is freezing, there's a charm to opening it up again. 

You are overwhelmed with kindness, with generosity, with friendships. How many keys are in your possession? They open doors across the land. You are not ignorant to that gift. 

One season goes, another takes its place. Some days it's enough just to see a new sunrise. Enough just to open your eyes.  

Start

You make promises to yourself, efforts to steer yourself back into a spine that feels like home. Circle the manuscript like a stray dog fearful of love. There may be something to eat in there. Promises are equal parts pressure and hope. Day one is just to open the door, glance at the jumble, reintroduce yourself. Friend or foe? It's been a long absence, you'll settle for a smile and a wave. Just a little snack. 

Time makes your joints rusty, but it's nothing you can't warm up. One toe at a time, one turn of phrase. Just open the blank page, just try a syllable on for size. 

Just start. 

There isn't much more to it than that.  

2026

A year begins.

14th street is quiet in the morning after, scattered confetti and a group of young boys on their way home, saying good morning and giggling, you allow it. The dog is oblivious to turned pages, her focus remains where it's been for ten years, on finding chicken bones along the edges of the sidewalk. There is a reassuring beauty in routine. 

You try to imagine your own proverbial chicken bones, the thing that'll keep you always on the hunt, always with your nose to the scents, the thing you'll never tire of trying to reach. You suspect it's a story, but it might just as well be the way your heart feels in your chest when the afternoon sunlight hits downtown Manhattan as you scale the Brooklyn Bridge. One is not worth more than the other. 

A year begins. 

You aim to begin
with it.