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.