Calls

At what point do these words become empty?

Just because we duet well together
doesn't mean we should.

Charge

Summer clings by the skin of its teeth, stretching its last handouts toward your parched lips. We set up birthday parties in the backyard, cook impromptu dinners and cavort down the FDR on a sunny Saturday morning. They closed off the highway to Battery Park and the air is full of low-flying helicopters. We cross the Brooklyn Bridge. Twenty years ago people walked with dusty briefcases and unbelieving eyes across this bridge, the city carries its scars like a merit badge, we never forget but we never give up either. One night later we sit on a lawn across the river, blankets spread across the warm twilight, watch a summer classic on the inflatable movie screen while the skyline of Manhattan glimmers behind it. I come for the view, not the movie. Come for the reminder that whatever else I do with my life I made this one right choice and it was worth everything. 

By Monday, the heat breaks in a lightning storm of epic ambition. I lie in bed watching the spectacle, flashes dancing from one end of the firmament to the other, smacks of light mixed with sharp needlings through the darkness. They put so many windows in this apartment I feel like I have been given more jewels than I deserve. 

But then, it isn't love if you're not always trying to earn it.

Well

Emerging from the depths of disease is a strange process, familiar and foreign each time, strange but common. There's a tentative flame at first, flickering at every gust, it tries to send little sparks and see what may catch in your chest. You stretch careful offerings to it, kindling dipped in only the slightest whiff of hope but daren't look directly at the light lest it extinguish. 

Then suddenly you feel skin under your fingertips, like discovering there was a body to you all along. There's a smile that doesn't require all your focus to appear, a run along the river that doesn't threaten to bury you at every step. You feel something that seems almost like peace, because you daren't call it joy. At every turn you expect it to disappear again, but you add one pebble of good onto another until at last it feels like a leg to stand on. 

You are still deep in the woods. 

But now there is a path through it.

Nerve

Drag a body out of heavy sleep, I was trying to solve a riddle I didn't even remember I carried in my blood stream. Surely I would have reached it if not for the alarm. 

We are perpetually inches away from the answer. 

September is gentle, somehow, easing autumn into your field of vision, trying not to startle you as it comes. You scare easily these days, every dendrite poised like a violin string, vibrating. But I am determined to find the lost pieces, build this ship back together, be someone who makes it out of the flood not with my shoes dry, but with my lungs still breathing.

I feel the air begin to set my strings
on fire.

South Tower

You have it down pat, she says casually, you should just work here. We joke that she can pay me in the cheap beer I come to drink at all hours anyway, if I just check vaccine cards and direct people to the bathrooms. Walking home later, the first sweatshirt evening of the season, swinging north to seventh street to check in on the little station wagon, I think it's not a bad idea really. Isn't this what community is?

At home, in the quiet little apartment above the deli, the television revisits a sunny September morning twenty years ago now. So impossibly long ago, yet present in every passing day on these south Manhattan streets. Outside the bedroom window, two bright beams soar into the sky. We never forget because we are made to remember. Bodies falling out of windows. 

September is impossibly beautiful this year, clear, quiet, saying nothing of impending doom. Across the ocean, your homeland lifts all restrictions related to the hijacking of life as you knew it. The lesson isn't ready to make itself known yet. 

You carry on.

or Another

The bourbon moves in for the season, early mornings with their cool breeze now despite warm late-night runs along the river, it's a confusing time of year. She writes from the upstate bliss, says it's the last day before the pool closes for the season, is a hundred Sunday scaries stacked on top of each other but if you haven't had a summer you cannot be sad to see it part. The only people putting away their whites tomorrow are the rich folks of the northeast and you haven't owned a loafer in your whole life. 

I chose poverty, I chose art and I chose New York and at the end of the 

season

I am not sorry.

Silent

Days pass in quiet mumbles, in averted eyes and failed restarts. An anniversary of 15 years in this city passes in sweet recollection; New York holds my hand as everything tumbles around us. Years ago I made deals with the devil, and the irony is not lost on me how he comes to cash in. 

I dreamed we kissed, surprised kisses out of years of wreckage. Don't worry, I know dreams get convoluted, don't worry; I know we have settled on never being so happy. I sleep with my window open and wake before dawn, cold air dancing over my naked limbs like taunts about the coming of fall. This year will be different, I etch into my skin with a dull pen, perpetually misunderstood teenager trying to will my voice into existence, still unsure if the years ever are different when I try to make them. Pandemics can still sweep in over the best intentions. It's when you try to please everybody that you lose track of what to believe. It's been 20 years since the towers fell and you don't feel a day over ancient.

It's okay. We'll wake soon, can pretend we won the war and all we have to do
is climb out of the rubble
and then we'll see the light.