Wax (v)

Sometimes,
for a short moment,
you breathe like you never forgot
how,
for a short moment, your skin
contains you and ends where you end,
without edges bleeding
into the intangible beyond.
August evenings are dark,
and cool,
and even as summer ends
it whispers promises
that something in you is
only beginning.

All My Life

I still believe in magic, I tell him, late night in Chelsea and the weight of the world on our shoulders. We woke so early, weekend traffic to the Rockaways and the ocean quiet before the crowds arrive. I speak with the ocean still but sweet now, I’ve stopped pleading with it to bandage these bleeding wounds and giggle in the waves. A ragged man sat on F train with his busted keyboard, playing songs I knew in my youth and loved, this was all before the coffee set in but I still sank into his chords and smiled, despite myself.

The movie was long, but beautiful, all cowboy hats and western Americana, I breathe easier with home in my spine, I can handle every life’s sadness against that desert backdrop. We walked out to discover a concert in the late summer twilight, I wore a sweater and marveled at the temperature but maybe it didn’t cause the shivers, life is strange in its wayward miracles.

I still believe in magic, I told him, 23rd street as the train rolls in and who do we find on the train car but the same ragged man with his keyboard and quiet harmonies, I stood mouth wide open at the door and had no answers to offer. This is New York, was all I could think to say before I left him at west fourth street, smiling at the Universe. The bartender only charged us for half the drinks and the bride next to us waxed on about her black heart, how there is hope still to be had.

We do not know all the things that are yet to come, we wade in our own insignificance. One day I asked the Universe for a chance to fail up and boy did the Universe deliver, I still make wishes at 11:11 and do you know, all of a sudden on the A train at midnight, everything you could think to ask for can come true.

Halcyon

All we want is to succumb to a single kiss
that will contain us like a marathon
with no finish line, and if so, that we land
like newspapers before sunrise, halcyon
mornings arrived like blue martinis. I am
learning the steps to a foreign song: her mind
was torpedo, and her body was storm,
a kind of Wow. All we want is a metropolis
of Sundays, an empire of hand-holding
and park benches? She says, “Leave it all up to me.”

and Then

The days pass with nothing to say. Nothing of torrential downpours and passing deadlines, nothing of street corner kisses and the dull ache in my shoulder that says life is passing by quickly and I'd do well to sit still for a minute and see it. She calls to say he's taken the kids, she calls to say her life is falling apart, again, again, how you wish you could save her against the world. When you were young she told you the bad things happening then were just God preparing her for so much worse to come, and some days you think her premonition strangely prescient, long after that God had forsaken her.

A sun begins its slow climb in the east. You set your alarms, too early, too cruel, but summer rolls into its dying breaths, you want to greet each one and watch it escape between your lips. You are still here, it whispers, you are still here. You are never late to a party you've arrived at.

Post

I woke to the sound of nothingness, to a dark Wednesday morning and checked the time: 3:25 a.m. Hadn't I just told a stranger how well I sleep at night? He walked me home before I could tell him I'm not the sort of girl you walk home; I had to count minutes in the stairwell before coming back out to sit on the stoop and smoke a cigarette, telling a girlfriend the walk home lets me digest an evening and now I didn't get a moment to myself. The evening was cool, as though fall might approach again, and somewhere in the pit of my stomach stirred the involuntary fear of winter. Too soon, I whispered to myself between glasses of wine. This isn't it. I tossed and turned in bed for much too long, seeing the early morning alarm clock race towards me with its promise of struggle. A novel manuscript lay upended around me, it is less a story now than assorted piles of dropped juggling acts and loose threads, I do not have time to be walked home late at night when I have this surgery to tend to.

My horoscope says this is the month my dreams come true.

And that doesn't happen unless you make them.

Tales

Your horoscope says this is the month your dreams come true, she says matter-of-factly. You stand in your Sunday casuals and wonder which of your dreams the stars are getting at, and what kind of net you'll need to rein them in. Do I just stand here and wait, then? I ask her, but the stars do not divulge their methods, so I go to bed and wonder if the tingle in my toes is approaching magic.

Mondays arrive with their usual humdrum in the airwaves, but I greet morning with slow steps along the river and move into the quiet office with my snail shell contents because all that is mine I carry with me and there is no peace in work if I do not live in it. It occurs to me that all the freedom I asked for is at my fingertips, that when I say if I could only spend a life like this I'd ask for no more I'm making hypothetical that which I've already made real. I pack up my piles of paper and my buckets of ink and move into the dark little bar off the Bowery to return to worlds I've created out of nothing.

My horoscope says this is the month my dreams come true.

I'm starting to think they already did.

Elastic Heart, II

Dreams are strange in intoxicated fogs, but you have an unnerving feeling your subconscious knows what it's doing. She writes to ask, if we do not make it, will you take the baby? and I cried on the A train, because it's hard to find the words to say you were already watching over this life as though it came from your own limbs. I said, yes. Morning dragged itself across my open wounds, my skinned knees, do you ever get so used to hurting that you forgot what ailed you to begin with?

The little girl sits patiently waiting at the blinking cursor. Her edges are scuffed, too, she did not ask for you to throw her in the flame, this fire that she did not know how she could survive, but you insisted she would, insisted she must. You pulled her through it by her hair, demanded she learn and grow and get the fuck back up out of the dirt every time she fell, and did she not follow your every vengeful command? Here she sits now, ready for her rewards. Here she sits, waiting for you to pick her up, brush her off, lift her up to a moment's rest in the sunlight. She whispers in your ear, Did you know that all the characters in your dreams are just variations of you?

I step up to the cursor. Begin the long drive home.