Feed

The air is heavy, breathes like cotton, the trains run slow like they feel it. The news continue to pummel your senses, everyone's senses, it's a relentless spin cycle and there's too much detergent in your eyes. I looked into their unknowing, happy faces and tried to remember that there is still joy in sunshine. Reminded him only to really remind myself.

Forest Hills smells like suburbia. It smells like SuperTarget and pear lotion and taking the car. It smells like air freshener in a home without soul, and you want none of it. Take a late train home to the island and breathe easier on its shores. I sat alone in the last train car through midtown and have never felt less lonely. This city holds me, knows me, sees me, and I am all the better for me.

He asked me when I would come home. But I don't understand the question.

In Circles

My clothes smell like the sea, salty, eternal, the waves were wild today and I almost lost my swim suit I almost lost my self for a moment and it didn't bother me in the least. My skin is sanded soft, my cheeks are flushed but it may just be a memory of breathless seconds stolen before you'd washed the sand out of your hair, something about that belt buckle in your jeans won't leave me although maybe it was a trick of the lights and it doesn't actually feel at all. Summer pulls at me, it tells me I have no others musts, no other dreams or desires beyond staring at this sunset every damn night and whispering into the New York night how much I adore it. I sit down late at night, when all is dark and quiet and stare at my word processor in silence, it's a duel and I'm losing. The story is silent when the days are so loud.

It occurs to me maybe I should be listening, instead. Let the magic
in.

11:11

You let it get to your head, the days, the freedom, the way the hideous glass monoliths of Williamsburg sing at sunset. There's a swing in your step that you can't shake but you assume you must be deluded somehow, it couldn't possibly be this unbearably light to be. A baby fell asleep in my arms today and I thought, that seems about right. It's August already, summer will be over soon, your youth will be over soon but you're shedding layer after layer of dust and other people's expectations on you it makes you younger than a chemical peel.

You wish all the time that you knew then what you know now.

But you know it now.

Start there.

in Reverse

All day I am tired, but come midnight sleep is elsewhere. But it's not the flood of strangers' eyes, it's not the voices of past ghosts reiterating their same lies into your bloodstream, it's not the sweltering air outside your window.

I think it's just life making itself known again. It waits till the streets are quiet, and then it speaks.

Have you listened to yours, lately?

Escapology

You pack your bag, prepare for a day, for easy, breezy, for Summer Mondays but something in your gut gnaws at you; you know it, you've seen it before, it rolls across your brow and pulls at your reins. It closes the door and puts you back in the corner, writes a to-do list and and dresses your soft brown skin in so much cloth. Sit in the window and wait for the thunder to roar in. 

Wonder what will be left when the rain washes your summer away. 

Privilege

The way he says snowflake grates at your spine but the way he breathes on your neck wipes the words from your brain so the night is a draw. You wait for hunger but it doesn't appear, so instead you try to fill the space with sentences; they are trite, but they live. Black clouds bubble in the back of your mind, you see them try to build and swat them away like insufferable pests. The humidity lays rivulets along your skin, the summer night whispers lewd ideas into your head, what else can you say?

Say yes.

Hold Up

Body weighs a thousand pounds in the mattress, morning sunshine so bright and your head yells seize the day but you can't even lift it from the plush dream. Everything swelters already. Drown your closed eyes in coffee, relish the endless free hours ahead. A night in the alphabet still swims in your head; she calls from packing, asking how to fit life into 2 suitcases and you think is there any other way to start over? You know so well her week-of panic. You adored it, for years, for generations of moving the blood in your veins and reveling in departure, in separation, in heart ache the only way to know you lived. You think now you may never feel it again.

On this mattress you learned to stay and still survive.