Upsell

My arm aches. I have stopped looking for the mouse, he will appear if he will, I leave my fate in his hands. We drink two bottles of wine in the rambly parts of the West Village, the world may be crumbling but it never didn't need unconditional friendships. I bike home drunk, but not so drunk that I don't feel the cool air on my face, not so drunk that at every intersection I don't look up and down the avenues to feel the monuments of New York City burst in my chest. 

People have stopped asking about my writing. Poetry lies in piles around my desk, it's a fine home for any rodent if you think about it. I used to think about the immensity of life and now I only ever seem to think of its restrictions. My mother has her last visit to the hospital, they celebrate her with balloons when she goes, it's hard to wrap one's head around it. Is something coming out of this year with joy? These questions are all too scattered, these words like post-its on the floor, my nephew walks in to his kindergarten class and we are never so aware of the years passing as when the childrn grow. Best, perhaps, not to have any then. 

My arm aches. I feel the ceasefire tenuous in my limbs, the stillness vibrating like a fine wire under tension, like I must grasp this tender moment before it is too late but I am frozen still.

You know those dreams where the ghosts are chasing you, and you try to run but move nowhere, your muscles burning and your chest like a weight?

Yeah.

Like Glue

I declare war on the mouse. Spend hours clearing out hidden corners and lining the kitchen with traps, eliminate even the smallest crumb from every surface. But the truth is he has already won, because at every moment am I not thinking of him? With every creak in the old tenement, do I not crane my neck to find any shadow of movement along the floorboards? Ghosts will kill us when the actual monsters never could.

The neighbor upstairs and I speak about it in the stairwell, after I have interrupted her uncomfortable first date goodbyes at the front door, another pest she couldn't get rid of. We are all just trying our best to make it through another day in one piece. I went to a street in Brooklyn and heard myself say this place has changed so much since I lived here but by now it's been 12 years since I did, and did you not think the world would move on? In 16 days, it will be 15 years since I first came here. He says I guess you're a real New Yorker now, and I don't know how to tell him I've had this conversation so many times before that it can no longer hurt me. I am not, without this city, and on its streets, I am everything; you think your rule book can take that from me?

It occurs to me that I am arguing with myself. 

There was less of that when you were here. But I don't think it matters anymore. 

You're not here now. And I still am. 

Who else am I supposed to talk to?

Inside

The vacation wisdom runs off you like dirt in the shower. Except this was insight you wanted to hold on to. The heatwave boils and burns around the brick buildings, the summer wastes away underneath me. I read old stories, try to remember what New York used to be, who I used to be. It's buried deep, now, so deep, and I think I haven't dared to mourn the loss. 

These words are only placeholders. 

That's sort of the state of things
in general.

Returns.

For days I do not see the mouse. I begin to clear its ghosts from the periphery of my vision, begin to believe the hardwood floors are mine. And then there he is again, late Friday night scampering boldly across the entirety of the livingroom floor, I wake with a start. 

The week has been too quick, asking too much of the air in my lungs, plucking the strings from my tenuous connections. I park dangerously close to fire hydrants and spend the day with a slight crick in my neck. The heatwave crests in the late afternoon, a hundred and two degrees and the building smells like a curling iron left on too long. When I deliver the work I am not happy. It is never enough. You are determined to find out what could be. 

Tomorrow you move the car. Take it from there. 

Arms

The mouse refuses capture, leaves a trail of unmistakable calling cards but hides in the heat of the day, you wonder if the upstairs neighbor killed him after all. Her manicured expressions don't suit the ramshackle wood staircase between your apartments, this cramped stairwell that breathes Lower East of old, you loved it at first glance, and she jars the view. She is now on first name basis with the exterminator. You hope the neighborhood chews her up and sends her to Murray Hill in due time. It is your most scathing review. The heatwave climbs up your window, sweating against the poorly sealed panes, he writes from under a starry sky and wishes you were there but the words all blur together, the names, the wondering pairs of eyes. 

It's okay
I know someday I'm gonna be with
you

but the didn't spell out the terms
of the contract and
I don't know if I'm upholding my end of the bargain.

Clean

(I do not own the timing, the way the words choose to come out, when they are ready. The evening is late when I feel the clarity, when I know it is time. I sit down and suddenly everything makes sense, by the time I finish I never want to sleep, I want to only keep writing, I never want to leave this corner of my shoebox, where the papers pile, the post-its reign and rain, where the books build walls and they look more like shelter. It was never that I didn't want to do it, it's that it wanted to do it right. He sends the silence to cover your borough, but you fill the voids with words, with curlicue lyrics for broken songs and you know you've never felt better than in the late, still nights of ink in your veins. You open a window and find the Alphabet City night quiet, the asphalt sweating after the thunderstorm, summer still wild and alive, you, a little too.)

Vermouth

Outside the window, the sky turns black as the thunder rolls in. You haven't left the apartment all day, now it seems too late. You cancel plans to cross the boroughs, run your fingertips across someone else's question marks, dive into work instead and wonder how the twists of words may soothe what ails you. The summer disappears under your feet, the life disappears behind your eyelids, four days in the Pennsylvania woods run from your skin like a monsoon. 

There's an answer somewhere in these depths. 

I'll find it
if it so kills me.