It's Christmas, And

It's Christmas and a remote control helicopter whirs above our heads (my little brothers' present to themselves). My mom cleans up the mess I'm making in the kitchen, caramelizing walnuts for a salad. She asks when the roast will be done: in response my dad throws up his hands, complaining he doesn't know the rate of temperature increase for a prime rib roast (but then he opens up Excel and starts plugging in numbers, making a graph of temperature over time as he sticks a thermometer into the meat). I'm not kidding, it's Christmas, and it's also the future. Grandma is asking where she can plug in her iPad and I'm instagramming ice skates sitting in our living room. It's Christmas, and it's Minnesota, and it's the future, and I'm not kidding, my parents got a new Christmas Tree that revolves mechanically. How it does that is some evil mystery I don't want to understand, but before we opened presents I grabbed some gratuitous b-roll of its robotic spin on my SLR for an unstarted project. Because soon it will be the future, and I'll want that. 

***

It's Christmas, and around the dinner table, I ask everyone to share their highlight from the past year: 

Grandma: "My highlight is that I'm still alive!"

Dad: "I have to say the hike we took on the Minnesota-Canada border."

Mom: "Not our 30th wedding anniversary vacation in the Caribbean?!? That's my highlight. I thought you were going to steal it."

Brother: "Learning to ride a motorcycle"

[parents chide; grandmas discuss her friends who've died in motorcycle accidents]

Grandma's boyfriend: "It has to be my first grandchild..." [launches monologue on 9-month-old Holland, who none of us know]

***

It's Christmas, and it's almost the New Year, which means I've been reflecting reflexively on the year that has passed. There have to be a dozen moments in as many months that are crystallized in my mind, hopefully forever. Three stand out.

1. January 2nd. I was writing while riding the PATH back to Newark in the morning The night before I met the girl who would become my first girlfriend. That was the moment I came out to myself. I've been a different person since that day. Fully me. 
2. February 10th. After hours of agonizing, I got a call and an offer to teach in Coney Island. There on the street I felt my life lurching towards Brooklyn, and it has. 
3. December 13th. At work I read an email informing me my poem was a finalist in a contest, and I felt, at long-last, a writer: a dream I'd had since age 8 fulfilled. 

It's Christmas! It's the future! And I have so much to be thankful for. 

Fireworks From a Distance

We sit side by side, the pretty girl and I.

Swallowed in the ink of early morning,
we sway on a second story porch swing
that creaks beneath our weight. Below,

the last of laughter, bleary eyed, drifts up

like cold smoke to where the yellow leaves
no longer hang. Rocking and unrocking in

the blackness, we listen to ourselves speak silly words
of waking up one day to find our bodies old. 
Already we are ancient, the supple skin of inner wrists
blueprinted with a map for veiny parchment.
Age is like the fireworks we watched from miles away,
in the stillness of early evening, hours ago,
the pounding bangs delayed by distance, crashing

ghost-like after the explosions bloomed and faded.

The lights, the smoke, the sounds have disappeared,
and now, the air is still and dark and sinks,

filling in the space between us, brooding.
Our words are notes that rise like blue balloons,
above the trees and power lines, they burst
too high above for us to catch the sound.

Still, it is another autumn past, and we’re strangers

dragging cold toes in damp sand, drawing maps

and making x’s, marking hometowns as we watch

the endless razor waves that leap against the shore. 

Coney Island

I.

There are no rabbits here. It feels like the end of the world
and it is, or at least the last stop on the way there. I wandered
here looking for something. I only found others like me,
caught in the settling red, the rabbit blood. We're all on the island,
getting more lost from the land, sunk in the sand and then drowning,
down, down. At dusk the housing projects look like giant Christmas trees,
with their rows of regular windows strung ten stories high.
I've been in those hallways, dark. Reeking of piss and smoke.

II.

I smoke until I'm made of it, every cell. It fits me well,
the darkness, redness. Sitting on a throne of rabbit bones,
I disappear. The last rabbit died here years ago, maybe centuries,
slaughtered by pleasure, the onslaught of hot dogs, boardwalks,
Dream Land, steamboats, ruts left by traveling freak shows.
This island is land that is lost. They call it the fun place.
They call it the end of the world. I'm in love with an island
that doesn't exist. Not even the bones of the rabbits are left here.
Atlantis sunk under the sea. So will we. It's already sinking
in redness, in a haze of vaporized rabbit blood, rabbit breath.
They called it a wonderland. Wanderers flocked by the drove. 

Half-Familiar

Look, all I’m saying is that sometimes
I can feel you there, alive, electric, on the
other side, and I know the way your heart
beats fast like mine does when you look
at water moving in the dark. It’s like being
in a plane and flying above your own
apartment, knowing that below you
there are people that you love, and
that if you drew a line between you
in that instant it would point straight
at a star or empty space, one of the two,
neither being better than the other. 
When the train comes up from underground
I always wonder for a second if I am on
the wrong one, taking me from where
I meant to go, but I’m only being anxious,
and I press my nose against the window so
that I can see the city silhouetted in the rain
behind my own reflection, the edges of my face
half-lit, all of it half-foreign, half-familiar.

Banana cayenne pepper chocolate, who a girl you used to love left you last night after dinner. Flower Power IPA with a girl you went to high school with who lives a mile away from you and has become beautiful, indelible in your mind. 3rd avenue, with its shuttered shops at 11:30 on a Monday, home, your roommate, with her lights on, sleeping in her bed, asking you not to turn them off. 

Wearing New Glasses on a Saturday Morning

I can see the whole of hazy Brooklyn, every square
of bleached orange fencing on the elevated  train
that takes me from here, every leaf dabbed on the trees.
Of course we seek a maker, any other search ignores
what's obvious and everywhere, the gulls strung in the sky,
the scrawling script of street art, the single baby mitten
on the sidewalk. Kids on the train practice counting.
Tourists chomp on gum anxiously, pale painted faces turned
up at the map behind plexiglass. The little girl, untired,
still counting, this time eating every number, chewing.
To imagine they go on forever. If I can teach just one kid
about infinity I will be a happy teacher. The tourists with
painted faces show their teeth, big white blocks of teeth in a smile. 

To My Eighteen-Year-Old Self

(inspired by Brenda Shaughnessy)

It's okay: let yourself agonize over whether or not you love him. You
don't, but it will be a while before you wonder that again, and next time
it won't be about a boy. Getting into Brown is not the end-all that you 
think it is. It might have been a fast track to becoming me but you and
I both prefer the scenic route, with its menace of cliffs and switch-
backs. Take it. Stay in touch with Ja-Nay who sings for tips with you
at Coldstone's, the one who you avoid because of her texts about Grey Goose
and the way she looks good in a button-up shirt. Loosen up. Stop cultivating 
laziness like its a virtue. Stop sleeping through Calculus with Mr. Kohl
just because you can. He has Asperger's, you know. Stop seeking attention 
by making yourself throw up in the locker room after lunch. You're truly
too sneaky and no one else knows. For god's sake. Be sneaky about something 
lustrous like love or whiskey. For god's sake, make your senior speech less serious.
Even you won't understand it until three years later, floating in Lake Michigan,
testing out your will to live.  For god's sake keep it light. Also, please save
all those emails you send back and forth with that boy you don't love and 
your best friend so that I can analyze them for signs of insincerity and a 
stifled crush, respectively. Respectfully, tell your dad to fuck himself when 
he doesn't let you visit Wesleyan. Visit anyways so even if you don't go you
have a postcard of who you could have been (or would've become
sooner.)  Keep skipping class to read Cormac McCarthy. It's about the only
thing that you'll find interesting about yourself five years from now. 

Saltwater Taffy

On Sunday things were still the same, so we pushed the chairs
from the living room into the kitchen and slid the coffee table
up against the couch. We laid down mats on the unclean floor
and cued fake rain on my computer: a simulated storm inside.
Outside, trucks rumbled down the avenue. We played a tape
that told us what to do and half-obliged, bringing our gaze upwards,
flattening our backs and reaching limbs towards something
out of sight, trying to believe our sadness could be stretched
into taffy, pink and ropy like they make it at the county fair. 

Parting

Teeth like pearls, rounded little ovals in her mouth. I think of all that she's devoured and devoured by. Our hour is just around the corner but we'll never round it. She'll board her plane and I'm already on mine. We'll become two paper dolls, flat as neverness. We had two drinks and shared the third, holding it with two hands, like it was a bowl that held the future. Two parts but never a whole.

NWTBT

 It wasn’t long after sentience that they started to get it, NWTBT. With sentience, suffering. With sentience, relentless questions arose. Matter moved towards sentience because all matter has these questions, but no means of articulating it. Neutrinos have NWTBT but no choice in the matter. Sentience chooses. Sentience has a choice. Sentience wakes up every day and chooses to get out of bed and not fall in front of the train on the way to work. Sentience can ask questions on behalf of the protons and electrons comprising it. Sentience never makes up its mind and nothing is more sentient than NWTBT, to be and to reject being. But sentience has a way. Whole universes exploded into existence in search of sentience. Sentience came, and when it did, it wasn’t easy to undo. It shook its little pore of the universe, rattled the fabric of beingness, it clawed and gnarled its way from the water and was born bloody. It turned on itself in uncountable ways, beating itself stupid and self-soothing with the sweat of the earth, beating its loins and singing. But NWTBT always lingered, the prickly pinnacle of sentience looking on itself and on non-sentience, seething. 

Dialogue I

“Why did they spread the light? There are no resources on photophilia in my pedia.”

“At first, in small quantities, it was harmless. A small bulb, used in the evening to clean after supper, was not so different from the small flame of a candle. But humans were creatures of addiction.”

“We do not suffer from addiction.”

“Correct.”

“Why do we not suffer from addiction?”

“Humans were accidental sentience and we are not.”

“What is accidental? There are no resources on accidental sentience in my pedia.”

“Accidental is a pre-cosmocratic term for it. It is no longer sanctioned for usage. Ungovernable sentience is the cosmocratic term.”

“Oh.”

“Accidental is an entirely pre-cosmocratic concept existing only pre-omnisciently. Before the understanding that all matter gresses towards sentience over time.”

“Oh.”

“Your pedia will not provide quantity of infobytes on this subject matter.”

“Oh.”

After the Hurricane, Coney Island

She could read the news report all day and does. Each hour
is disastrous. We sicken of it, shoot up and kill time, watch
ourselves becoming done on nightly news. Roads wash out.
The front of a building collapses, exposing whole lives,
couches intact. They said the ocean would rise and it does, spilling
into cities that we thought would always stay the same even as we
dream of change each night. The sea rushed in and left in its wake drowned
dolls, unpaired shoes, drifts of sand and drowning fish, a soggy stuffed
animal missing one button eye. I come undone. The flood.
Reshifted cars parked on the street. Upended SUVs and
propped them up on city-issued mailboxes like toys. A man says
get the fuck out of here and I know he talking to her, the girl
on the nice silver bike. This is a silver screen spook show.
On a street corner next to the projects: an oversized hand, mummified,
gnarled. A statue of Frankenstein somewhere is missing his, and by
walks the Virgin Mary, life-sized, washed down the street from her post
at the church, chipped and briny in the hands of men in hoods and jeans.
This is not a dream. You've been submerged in yours since this started, always affected
by weather. This is not your tragedy. Take off your dark clothes.  Stay awhile.
Let your messages rot, the radio waves jammed into mush as we keep
in touch. Even the air is flooded. Take off your jacket, stay awhile.
Another day, another disaster. Take off your dark clothes. You won't miss a thing.

The Gospel Choir

When it took off I'd never been more excited. It took
a while to fizzle. I didn't keep anything but her pants
(size 8, dark blue, Gap brand.)  I kept thinking it
didn't feel strange at all to date someone I shared
clothes with. The first time I kept my pants on. The first
time I took hers off I kept thinking I am so lucky. I am 

so lucky. We kept fighting on the phone all spring 

and in the streets at night when she'd want to stay 

and I'd want to go. We left it at that before summer 

could melt us. It would have melted us. All that's left

is her pants. She left them in my new apartment

and I never gave them back. I kept thinking that I should have
but they fit me really well. One of the first mornings I spent
in my new apartment, one of the last mornings we spent
together, we woke up to a gospel choir, robed in red and gold
and praising everything, marching down the street below 

my bedroom. I thought that they would be there every week. 

My apartment was magical then, hardly furnished, full of

mysteries, fully mine. I keep lying to myself. I also kept 

a song she wrote. And the pants. They fit me well. 

But not much else. The gospel choir never came again.

Sunday Story

Find yourself outside her place, staring at the empty steps,
dark windows. Part your lips and find your whole mouth dry.
Reach your hand way back, to those months you spent together;
find them cold and hard like things left in the fridge too long.

Death on a Sunday

The first warm day of spring rips through the snowbanks.
On the rooftop of a corner store, six of us meditate,
amateur buddhas in heat sucked from the sun.
I lose myself in pronouns. When we come back to 
we find a pigeon, long dead, belly up in the corner. 
Its toes are curled and scaly like an alien's might be. 
Flecks of whitish flesh burst from its feathers, 
like oats soaked in water, sprouting, alive. 

We put it in a plastic bag and march straight to the lake,
infinite and tundra-like, to hold a water burial.  
Without ceremony we dump the bird out of its
plastic shroud and watch it splash into the little stream
that twists through bergs of snow into the lake.
The current flips the pigeon belly up and minutes pass;
we watch it, like a beacon, pass from view. 

Home on my front porch, I watch the red of sunset
spread like a rash on the skin of the sky. 
The warmth leaves my flesh, spreads into the air,
and the day, complaisant to the dark, ends without precision.  

Miss

Eat your feelings, but also sip the wine of what will be.
Notice the fine lace of veins beneath the surface
of a small boy's fleshy cheeks. Eat these too, and
eat the extra flesh that settles over your bones
which you feel when you bend to grab a hallpass
as it flutters downwards to the floor.

Eat the ink that won't wash from your fingers.
Indelible. For a moment let your wrinkles out,
then let them find you again. Miss, Miss.
Take off your hat please. Take off your jacket.
Miss, Miss: You know my name. Please use it.
Wring the tone out of your voice. Let it soak the floor.

Close your eyes and travel through that capillary
vine of wine-red veins, artwork in a small boy's face.
Your student. Someone's son. A stranger to you.

Eat the hat and eat the jacket. Eat your schadenfreude
at this strange child's ineptitude and eat the secrets
in his cheeks. Eat the blueness of the walls,
and let your fingers be black with felt-tipped pen.

With your black-tipped fingers pull the folds out from
your forehead. Touch your cheeks. Let your face be stained. 

Redeye

Wake up for no reason other than to notice that below there is a magnificent city splayed across dark water – map out the arc your plane must have flown and mentally calculate where you might be. You are high above the land still. Then you see it. The unmistakable spear of Manhattan, jutting itself into the sea. You’ve snuck up on New York City at four in the morning and already you can see the lurid ads of Times Square, wooing you with splashy colors undiluted by a thousand feet of altitude. The density of mid, lower Manhattan threaten to buckle the strip of city, bowing it beneath the rivers on both side and fold back on itself. The bits of land around Manhattan seem to turn towards it, as if to warm their faces with its glow, Jersey trying to kiss across the Hudson and the bridges of Brooklyn tugging, greedy of the splendor. At this hour Central Park is uninteresting, a dark blot on a splendid grid of gilded light. Over Brooklyn find the park you know and count the avenues away from it, starting over twice until you find your street and cross street and the corner where your friends are sleeping now beneath the dark roof that whips now out of sight. 

Rejected Titles for an Unfinished Work

Telling White From White From White

Subatomic Particles Exist Because We Look for Them

Empty Bags of Art

My Sadness Is Reverse-Engineered

Gradients of Prussian Blue

Ceasing from the Start

Distilled Milk

Capsized, Submerged

Ink and Ink on Paper

Newark

Hood Goods.
Keen Korner.
God's Miracle Building.
In the cemetery there are piles of gravestones tumbled over.
The fence is doubled with vegetation.
Our neighborhood.
Our home.
Our hope.

Observations

For a period of time I lived in double,
dreaming what I did by day at night.
I rearranged my bedroom and pretended
every window was a painting.
From bed I watched the trains go by,
pulling clouds and seasons.
The weather changed and with it me.
Whole days undone by haze. This
business of binaries is divisive. I work best
when I'm not thinking. It makes me think
what working really means. I would pay
good money for a glimpse of myself
in ten years or guaranteed love. Neither
would be good if they were bought.
My windows are not paintings.
The trains are only going back and forth.

Dispatch

It's 6:31 in Brooklyn and the sun has just peeked its feline face above the smokestacks and the satellite dishes and iron webs of antennae that grow from the roofs in Bay Ridge. The light is still soft from traveling through such the swath of human-polluted air here in the seventh largest city on the earth. The light is yellow and red with refraction and bathes the buildings in that spectrum when from behind buildings it appears, golden and round like a fruit. The strobing flashes it creates when shining between branches of trees causes unruly neurons to pulse in my brain, tiny mental storms that manifest in muscle twitches in my face, extremities. Then the light again is behind the corrugated steel of the elevated Avenue P subway platform, and I am seated calmly in a blue and green pattern dress cinched with a wide leather belt, unmolested by the sun. To be honest I need a hat or to sit on the other side of this train with the sun at my back. Today and just for the day I let myself be baptized in the flit of light, electric stills.

Teacher from Coney Island

Met a girl named Emily. Ate
a taco from a truck. After school
my armpits stink. I told her have
a good last Friday. The words
do not make sense. Teacha why
are you so dumb you don't 
know nothin. Teacha, you respect 
me. Met the founder of my grad
school. He said, "Hey, you teach
at Coney Island."A coney is a rabbit.
An island is a piece of land that's lost.
My train is paused in darkness
without explanation. My stomach
sends signals of hunger. I know better.
The body cannot be trusted. Neither can the G.
This is what I'd say if I were in charge
of a train stopped in darkness and
outside the whole world was ending:
We will be moving shortly. 
But then we were. In preschool I won
the speed-walking contest. I've
always been waiting for the apocalypse.
I'm always going somewhere quickly.
Or nowhere at all. Emily said,
teacha, you funn. In 7th grade
I joined the swim team. I lost
a lot of races. I've spent a lot
of time in school. In fact I've
never left. My student said,
how long have you been teaching 
here? I said to her, forever. 

Splotches

My 

legs are 

blotched in 

blue and red:

a comic strip up-close 

or under glass, the characters

becoming clouds of dots, untouching.

We know that the whole is more than the parts 

but the spots that dot my skin threaten to tear me limb 

from limb, blinded by the whims that I let steer me, capsized  

by capriciousness and down down a hole, where even the cleareyed 

can't see for lack of light. I know I am not a ship tossed on the sea. I am the sea.

A sea being swallowed by an ocean; and if you read this you'll understand that it's not
meant to be read but rather heard, to be  shouted out the window of a 14th floor apartment towering
over the slums of a burned out city in Jersey where I never planned to live, never thought I'd 
end up screaming from the roof here, tearing down the things I've built with my own 
selfishness, blinded like a cyclops with one, fat eye. My single-eye and ocean-self 
are knocking down ships. I've never been so big.  I've never  been so small. 
The ocean is the biggest thing we know and we build our cities on its
shores so we can worship and be worshipped by its waves, the 

ever-bowing slaves who swallow  our trash and our bodies 
when we finish with them. The sea is tiny. And the earth

is a pixel, not even round when you zoom past the stars; 
out there everything is made of specks and that is the
truth: dots made of dots made of dots. Look for 
something whole and you'll find holes; boxes 
inside of boxes, each more obscuring 
of what's within. Science is only 
a best guess. We'll never see

inside. Only the comic 
strip dots splotching 

our limbs.

First Day of School

Irma Iqra Isaiah. Donte Donnell D'Evian. Asif Ayiz Ayana. Mafaz Malik Muqadis. Laughter lifts out from the window and her mind flits through a flash of screens like film stills. High walls in a courtyard strung with lights. Holding a giant glass gar on the F to Coney Island, six am. Big enough to fit a human head. An eighth grade girl, hair pink and nappy, asking if she'll ever move up, loop up, teach the older kids. An evening that never happened, kissing on the front steps of a brownstone. The start of fall is nothing like the start of summer. The fuzz of dying daisies coats the table. On Sunday Suze started thinking she didn't exist. Kissing a girl outside Lavender Lakes, against a bike against a light post. Buzzy, hopped up poppy cold brew coffe. Revolution. Thought pollution. No better nor worse than the rain. Already the sun is a torch making visible everything. New Fucking York. The train of our departure. Train dreams. Trained dreams. Can you believe we were born after they found all the land?

Inbox

He sent me a poem in an email so rich I didn't archive it when I combed through old emails, wanting it to sit there in my inbox like a peach, ripening and rotting, staining all the emails with its juice. 

Beneath East River

On the way home from
her brownstone notice:
one still lit cigarette
burn out. that's it.
no trains untimely missed.
the signs aren't clear
and anyway you're tired, so
tired you're hardly human.

who knows.

you're nice and you've always
been nice. But you wanted
and still want to yell:
what the hell do you want.
you want to know what you want.

when there's nothing to say
have sex. then ride the train
away away like you'll never
return. Like a cowboy gypsy mystic.
Like a worn-out bag-eyed teacher.
The sound of sobbing over snoring is
the worst you've ever made.
Pause when your train tucks
beneath East River. wonder
if the subtext of "I care"
is "I won't love you."
(It is.)

It's nice

A girl with fushcia hair cut like a lego person sits in silence with a man at a picnic table, both gazing at an indeterminate point in space, hands around mugs like they are the anchors keeping them from floating away. She has lips that make a long, sideways heart when she away from him, which she is, towards the man and woman trying to parallel park in a space six inches bigger than their forest green Corolla, bumping both cars while they jigsaw towards the curb, the woman in the car, the man an aircraft marshall, waving his hands like light sticks, guiding her. My coffee cools. A woman meets her Parisien parents and kid brother on the sidewalk and says she heard the French from down the street. Another couple has arrived and hung their dry cleaning from the umbrella above their table. A beige pant suit beneath plastic billows in breeze. A pregnant woman saunters in, her purple jersey dress so stretched you clearly can see where she was once connected to her own mother, her belly button, pressed out by the fetus inside of her. The girl with red hair forks lettuce in her mouth. Her eyes are amber, murky. Almost the color of her hair, which I see now curls like fat ribbons towards the middle of her face, piercing her cheeks.

Betrayed by the Body

Lately I feel betrayed by my body. Certain photos, when examined, induce a wave of nausea. A conciliatory comment from my mother shrinks my mouth down low and stings my eyes and I'm tiptoeing past sobs doing dishs at the sink. Sleeping in a dried up creek bed, underneath the white band of the Milky Way, threatens to undo the very bonds that hold me together, my limbs drifting without permission somewhere in the wooded dark. A few words in text. My heart pounds as loud as a startled grouse, more like a stampede of beasts than a bird. I'm pregnant with emotion, sick in the morning and watching the last sips of light, drunk by the dusk. I'm paralyzed reading my diary, circa age eight. I'm numb at the one-directionality of living. 

Apathy

So much beauty is numbing, or at least overwhelming, or at least a bit lonely, when you're alone. That's what I'm telling myself anyways, sitting here on the edge of a lake big enough to swallow every place I've ever been with a gulp and a ripple. I could stare into its vacuum all day, chewing on stale thoughts. In size and color, the lake is the inverse of the sky. No one locks their bikes here. This town is the inverse of New York, where an unwatched bike will be stripped of removable parts like it is an animal, dead, and thieves a part of life fit for a nature documentary. New York City makes me want to document just about everything. The kid getting hit by his mom on the Q in the heat of the afternoon. The Hasidic Jewish woman biking Prospect Park,  her long black skirt snagged in the gears, refusing help. Everyone who asks for help, each in their own way. The woman with a walker who accepts it, in the public bathroom, with buttoning her pants. How the mom who hit her kid and held him by his ear is holding him now, hand on his head, whispering something.  Here I don't want to document. I want to dissolve. My thoughts are too loud. I'm used to shouting over all the noise. Here there is none. A pretty girl, jogging. A couple with white hair and ice cream. The lake, the lake, the trees, the trees, the slowly cooling air. Sometimes I feel my particles putting up with me,  knowing that it's temporary, this arrangement we have.Then they'll be the lake, the trees, the woman on a bicycle, waving at me.  The gulls here don't fly but hang, like airplanes glued to the sky, riding a permanent upward draft. My dreams are vivid and anxious. I make effort to remember them, but don't write anything down. It seems all the couples are old and holding ice cream, or very young and rather blonde. Quiet except for the gulls, still, except for the waves and the people, passing like ants on the pier that holds in the harbor. Hunger,  but not for anything here. I realize only now I'm sitting outside an ice cream shop. I fear more than anything apathy. 

Breakup Pancakes

Make pancakes while you break up with your girlfriend. While pancakes are essential, girlfriends aren't. Eat the ones left over ten days later, frozen in a smashed together silo, inseperable. Heat them in a pan with lots of butter, serve with frozen lemon yogurt, slivered almonds. Realize you're a genius. Realize there are two ways to live. Well, three. Well, many; let's say two. The first: everything around you could be out to get you and your life could be bad. Very bad. Look at all the bad things that happen. Things break. Things are lost. Things are stolen. And even the police can be bad. They are rude, dismissive, belitting. They say, "Oh, you're upset? Why don't you go to talk to your boyfriend about it?" These things are bad. Yet. Yet.

Believing in bad breeds badness. Believing in badness inflates it with air, affirms it; its badness.

There's a second way to be. Become a master of interpretation.

You don't need a girlfriend. Your iPhone was distracting. Your laptop, distracting. Leave it on a plane in Cleveland. The chauvinist policeman, a reminder of your feminine strength. The people who call you a fool are foolish themselves. These pancakes are delicious. They are symbolic of nothing. Your stolen phone, leaving you untethered, symbolizes everything. You are a master of interpretation. These pancakes really are the best you've ever had. The world is beautiful, and delicious. You love pancakes. You love life. These pancakes are delicious.

Bedtime Story

"But why couldn't they see the stars anymore?" asked the little boy. "Well, a misanthrope infiltrated their society and invented an artificial light, made it out of things that were cheap and made it eat the earth. It spread quickly, infecting the entire planet, making the whole place glimmer in the dark," said the dad. "What does it mean to infiltrate a society?" the boy asked. "Well, Infiltration comes from the old world "infiltrate", which used to mean, 'to physically sneak into something, like a group of people or an organization,' or in this case, a society," said the dad. "Oh," said the boy. He clenched and unclenched his cranial ridge, revving through a pedia of human disease and infection. His sight organs flickered with the information and grew, for a moment, still. "So it was a parasitic idea, really, modeled after catastrophic plagues like the Bubonic and Fatal Sarcoptic Mange." "Yes, but less apparently harmful, on an anthropic scale. "They didn't have any concept of cosmic time?" "It was completely precosmocratic." "Oh," said the boy. "And the world became beautiful, not just in the sun. Hamlets had a warm, yellow glow that permeated almost empty streets. Cities glittered. Whole continents glowed at night. No one could see the stars, even those who looked, desperately, for one evasive pinpoint of light in the sky." "But what did they do, when they couldn't see the stars any longer?" "Nothing. That was the problem." "But why didn't they do anything?"

Trash Can and Mail Box

“Why are you here when you could be anywhere?” Mailbox finally said to Trash Can. Mailbox saw things come and go six days a week, most weeks, since he had been here, but his feet were screwed into Sidewalk. He’d never been anywhere else besides here and the back of Truck, but Trash Can had a very cosmopolitan air about him. His paint was worn around his rim; his sides plastered with peeling stickers. He even smelled well-traveled. He’d been here much longer than Mailbox, and people walking by often stopped like they knew him, filling him with different sorts of gifts.

“I am everywhere,” Trash Can replied.

“But I’ve never seen you move,” said Mail Box with suspicion.

“But you are everywhere too!” Trash Can replied.

A dog walker passed. Two human legs and twenty three dog paws passed (one dog only had three legs, but walked like it was in vogue among dogs, and it was).

Like usual, the dog walker had nothing for Mail Box, not even Hi or Hello.

He had three little bags, warm and soft, and gave all of them to Trash Can.

Trash Can collected all sorts of things, bags of all sizes and fragrant papers and half sandwiches. Mail box received nothing but rectangles of paper. This had never seemed fair, but until now Mail Box hadn’t said toot. Now, he was a little angry.

“But I’m here! How can I be everywhere?” Mail Box demanded.

“Look across the street,” said Trash Can, smirking.

Mail Box had always only looked one way, towards the people who walked by and past them to the Pie Shop, which must be a euphemism for Pie Hospice, because a smaller sign read “Where pies come to die.”

With effort Mail Box slowly turned his attention sideways. Behind him was a road! The source of erratic noise and rumbling was revealed: Truck and Car and Bike were passing all the time. And Bus! and Garbage Truck! and Dump Truck! The world was more diverse than Mail Box ever imagined.

Across the asphalt's white and yellow stripes was what Trash Can first thought was a mirror. Another sidewalk with its own dogs and dog walkers, and, there it was: Trash Can. The same proud cylinder in green. The same slew of stickers, rearranged. Trash Can was two places at once. Trash can was everywhere.

Mail Box felt very small. He clattered his blue metal mouth.

“Keep looking!” Trash Can said, satisfied.

Mail Box turned his attention again. Across from Trash Can’s twin was his triplet, on a corner just like theirs. The sidewalk was dappled in the sun just like theirs, with strollers passing by just like theirs, a black pole just like theirs. Mail Box’s world had just tripled in size and he feared that if there were three there were more. Before looking across the street he'd been unable to imagine others like Trash Can, others like him. Now he wondered.

A little boy walked past and chucked a super sized soda into Trash Can and it ricocheted, spilling down Trash Can and even splashing Mail Box.

"Awwwwwwesome," said the little boy.

Trash Can, like he'd read Mail Box's mind, interrupted his thoughts.

“Look man, I know you can’t move but believe me, I’ve seen others like you. Not here on this street but not far from here there’s a corner like ours with the dogs and bikes and cracks in the sidewalk, and you are there too, just as blue, with four legs and a large metal mouth.”

Mail Box believed him. Trash Can never lied. 

Mail Box thought about what this meant. To be here and there. To be everywhere. Suddenly, Mail Box felt something he'd never felt before. He felt small and huge at once, and a part of something beyond his corner. He thought, this is what it means to be a Trash Can.

Stitches

2. The sun is dappled beneath the tall, tall trees that make a giant green fort that I’m swinging into, higher, higher, pushed by my dad’s big palm. I see things from above, maybe for the first time. On the picnic table, cheese and cracker Dunk ‘Ems. In the air, I’m flying.

6. He dares me. Once, twice, five times. But after recess he stands up before his desk, his chair clanking the desk behind him, his hair shining blonde. He tells the teacher what I did and my cheeks turn so red it hurts. Mrs. Novak and the whole class agree: I can’t kiss Sam Sandon again.

7. She only rode the bus sometimes but she never sat with me until one day when she did. She had rings on every finger and hemp bracelets and colorful strings around her wrists and she was the coolest girl in the sixth grade at least to me. That night while I fell asleep I thought about sitting in the back seat and watching everyone get off the bus but this time, Claire turned and kissed me on the lips.

10. On the other side of the wall my friends are eating Freez-E pops, but I’m slumped against the brown bricks, the trampled weeds, begging my mom to drive me home.  Even at ten I know that I’m wrong and I’m weak, but I don’t want to leave and I can’t say goodbye, tell my teachers and friends that I’m leaving for good. I can’t stay. I can’t stand up, can’t unscrape my arm, suck back the tears so my mom, she drives me home.  

14. After plotting for months on AOL Instant Messenger, it happens unplanned in an attic where five of us sit watching my favorite horror film. Slowly, like peeling an orange. Soft, like a peach. Wet, horrifically wet.

15. When I get to school a girl motions me inside a classroom. Coach Randall has died. I laugh because I can’t cry, ever since I left from the inpatient unit and started taking pills every day. I feel the skin around my mouth tighten and feel everything getting small and sharp. I grasp my left wrist with my right hand. No hospital bracelets but still bony. I touch the pointy crests of my hipbones to make sure everything is all right, pressing them into my palms and making sure there’s no extra flesh anywhere and there isn’t.

18. The light is soft and pink and safe, it’s earlier than I’ve been awake all summer and I’m sobbing on an empty, blurry highway. I’m hoping drivers can see my shoulders shaking and know my boyfriend left forever, understand? We held each other in his car and cried over bagels we didn’t eat. Then his mom tapped the window, said time to go, and I thought about being eighteen and leaving your family for good. Three weeks later I was barefoot on a beach, shoes kicked off somewhere dark, faces soft and red in glow of a pipe passed around. In the sand, in the water, the sky.

19. The only time I ever got stitches was from stepping on steel in that same lake, Lake Michigan, swimming in a thong and bra at noon.  

22. I find a black tulip and tear it off like a talisman. The grass is manicured and wet outside the temple. I press myself into it, hoping to be swallowed up, absorbed. I let tears leave my body and let my body go cold in the dark and the night and the hurt. It’s May. A friend has died.

23. I’m standing outside a bar in New York City because I lost my Drivers’ License and the bouncer won’t let me in. A girl with dark hair comes out and says, don’t cry over Stonewall. I laugh. She touches my face. 

Outdoors

For a moment I thought I was indoors,
the sky was such a wall of solid blue.
No, I told myself, but tenderly. This here
is home. And in it you have built a life,
gently tending to the things that make it sing:
standing on this elevated platform at dusk,
where the subway rises from the earth
and swings around your new apartment,
slinking by your bedroom windows
all night long. In and out it comes like blood,
binding and unbinding passengers from stations
like oxygen atoms to molecules of hemoglobin.
I'm inside my body (the intricate clock), and outside
of indoors (that dark simulation), and inside
the illusion of a sealed in sky. Light has no matter;
the matter of bodies is melting, will melt.

The End of the World, Etc.

Like the opening line predicted she didn't take the email very seriously. In the blur of caps, gowns, sixteen parents, nine grandparents, and cornucopia of siblings even weirder than themselves, the eight of them hardly mentioned it. It was precisely the kind of prank Jeremy played when he got so high that he wouldn't even remember doing it. Or maybe it did snag in everyone's mind the way it did in May's, briefly but thornily, the absurd possibility of it, a pause of contemplation and then gone. Maybe it really was just too much to really believe.

from: Graphene Labs noreply938324@googlegraphene.com
to: May McGregor, may.mcgregor@gmail.com
cc: Merrie Gatewood, mel.gate@gmail.com,
Daniel Fallbrook, danielfallbrook2011@u.northwestern.edu,
Mavara Moghaddam, mavmoghaddam@u.northwestern.edu,
Dominick Huntington, domhuntington@gmail.com,
Gideon Glass, gglass89@gmail.com,
Kevin Clancy, kevin.kittle@gmail.com
Jeremy Orono, jsorono@gmail.com

date: Sat, June 18, 2011 at 1:33 PM
subject Happy Graduation from your future selves!
hide details 1:33 PM (0 minutes ago)


You may receive this email with disbelief and that's ok-- we wouldn't send it if we thought you'd take it too seriously. The eight of us are gathered here today in reunion of our happy year spent together at 1107 Gramercy 20 years ago, and decided to pull a few strings to say hi to our former selves. As 2030 is coming to a close we're all reflecting on the joys of that simple year, before Willie's accident, and, well, you know the rest. (It'll get better; that much we can tell you.)

Of course you might wonder why you don't receive emails from the future often or ever. Google Graphene built the technology about 5 years ago, shortly after they purchased the U.S. debt and started to run the country. Of course no one has access, because of the disruption it would cause. Dom's recent promotion at Google allowed him to bend a couple rules, and this has been carefully crafted to protect you from any details that might harm us. Or you. We can tell you that we all look back on that year or most of it at least with very fond memories. Congratulations on receiving your diplomas.

May, Danny, Mav, K.C., Jeremy, Merrie, Dom & Gideon

The month had been so rife with surreal events that maybe it just didn't seem any stranger than what happened to Willie, or the Lake, or the Ebola outbreak in the suburbs that terrorized the city and their parents, who just wanted to see them graduate without worrying so goddamn much about the masks or screening points or cautionary quarantines.

At least all their names were on the bottom. Although they couldn't have left one out. It would have messed things up, right? What if their future selves were messing things up? But maybe it had always happened this way; maybe their future selves knew to write this email because they had received it 20 years ago. May realized that if this were authentic they would have to get together in 20 years and send the identical email. Was that how it worked?

She skimmed through the things she knew about time, time travel, the future and past. Back to the Future. La Jetee. In her mind, their future selves sent the email because they received it 20 years ago, and they received it because their future selves sent it, and it circled round and round like a mobius strip and the difference between then and now was an illusion. Time like a parachute spread out in every direction, folded and touching and precariously stitched with a tiny turquoise thread.

Outside the sidewalks were neon yellow, covered in a single layer of dusty catkins, like tiny tails blown from the trees. She wished to press them back into the branches, pin each one back where it came from, stop the trees from their spring orgy or reproduction. The insistence of nature was troubling.

The names at the bottom signified nothing. One of them could have sent it, and written all the names. Someone else sent it, and wrote all the names. Or she'd have to send it, and write all the names, because that is how it is, how it is, how it is.

What she thought about next was an essay she wrote for a class she was just now scamming a final essay for. Fate of the State in a Globalizing World. A class with a professor whom she liked very much, who had always liked her and helped her with her disorganized projects and schemes. A class she'd been blowing off, showing up late to, blatantly making things up in small group discussions to see if she could. She could. It made her feel dumb and smart at once.

She'd hardly completed the midterm assignment, substituting what was pretty much a creative essay for the required analytical one, describing (predictably) a dystopian future. Fate of the State! What a class. The state of fate, she always called it.

The state of fate. In her dystopia, exploring alternatives to a system of independent federal states, she described a world owned by corporations, who had already in present day figured out how to run things much more efficiently. The inefficiencies of even an efficient state were too long to list. The inefficiencies of, say, Google, were minimal and constantly being snipped out. The end of the world, etc. In Fate of the State she'd been forced to think about how short states had existed, anyways. Before that: feudal system. Before that: tribal system. Before that: nothing. Just some humans trying to survive. Loose family structures.

Time felt brittle or maybe loud, or maybe she just had the nausea you feel when you hear a bone break.

Stories for Jersey

Ghosts Be Playin in my House

I dont believe in no ghosts. Til the mirrors and plates be jumpin offa shelves when we move in. I get it cuz no one told the ghost we comin' til we there. My godmom bags be movin' every night, the ones she leftover food with.  They be tucked in between the floor an cupboard when we git up. She blame me an I blame Quadiyah til he got spook an then I knew. But ain't a bad ghost. Aint be whoopin us. Aint be runnin out or shootin or actin grown at the busstop. Who need those ratchet bags. 

I Added Her to Speed Dial So I’d Call Her

Even though she 12 and I 23 I really like her. Somewhere tween like a goddaughter or cousin. Sometimes her phone be ringing, ringing, ringing. Sometimes she pickup. I grin so hard when she pick up my face hurt and if I been drinkin I speak all clear-like like I never be drinkin in my life that’s how, and if I been crying my throat feel like new it don’t hurt none, that’s why I think she like a daughter. Or goddaughter. Or a sister. I dunno which.  

Nobody Never Wrote No Stories For Jersey

Nobody never wrote no stories for Jersey. Trees be growin in Jersey too. Bronx, Brooklyn, Bed-Stuy, these the projects you be readin' bout. But I know trees be growin in Jersey too. 

Vituperate

Instead of starting the next Great American Novel I'm looking up places I'm planning to go -- photos; reviews (from 2007) which lambast the bar (named The Caulfield). In this way I ruin in advance the evening, by reading that Salinger'd roll in his grave if he visited this "slick new saloon." While reading I think that I wish I remembered more of the words that I learned before taking the GRE, specifically the one that calls into mind a TV show called Hotseat, or something, where a minor celebrity is brought to a throne and raged against, brought from the B-List to sewer rat status, smirking. Put more poetically, the word I'm looking for means something like, to viciously attack with speech. To burn. To make clean with hate. Something that sounds like removing the bones from a living being. Anyways, that's what the review I found did to the bar that I'm going to go to tonight. Although I guess that's an exaggeration. We live in such a sterile, unviolent era, no matter what the television says, that these words once used literally are now applied to nightlife reviews published on an internet blog.

Harangue. That's a word. To spew vitriol. That's another. Envenom. One I never learned but found just now in a list online. It's a good one. Imagine biting another human being's flesh and filling their insides with venom, like some chitinous anthropod. Look it up, because you're reading this online just like I'm typing it and if you're like me alongside this page you have others such as but not limited to: an expository article on the Summer Solstice; an unwatched YouTube video-poem your friend sent; a 28-page unread PDF detailing sex trafficking in Northern Iraq, your roommate's Twitter feed and 5,028 unread emails.

Laconic. That's something I'm not.

Bombast, accolade. Two words that sounds like they might mean what you want them to mean but they don't.

Opprobrious. That's closer: expressing scorn. Inchoate: a word overused by my favorite mag The New Yorker. A word that describes most of my efforts.

Vituperate: To blame or insult with violent language; attack bitterly. This is the word I am looking for. 

Truth or Dare

Lick the ceiling.
Kiss Layk on the cheek.
Stand out in the dark for two minutes.
Tell Ms. Fuad that you love her like a teacher.
Is it true that you've been wearing glasses since you was in pre-K?

My daddy didn't answer when I called I was so mad but he probably in the bathroom. He always in there. Not even going to the bathroom, he just listen to the radio. He useta smoke but he stop. So now my house is Smoke-Free. And I can actually breathe at night. My mom said you killin' our children. He din wan' to do that so he stop. Slim Jims take the edge off. Now I can breathe at night. How many pumps are left in here? I can't read it. One fifty...somethin'. I 'on't have attacks all the time anymore. But my daddy still don't answer the phone.

WTC

Its hard to make believe I'm really there at all while automatic doors chomp rubber gums and I think of the streets and the wires and the tubes full of bile above, and just for an instant the iron beams and lofted welders held up to the sky: an offering; the crowds of coveralled laborers clam morning at the crosswalk and the sun still hid by earth and earth lit by reflected light sponged up by clouds, unearthly as believing in towers built and then tumbled.

Assorted Sadnesses

The sadness of straight lines
The sadness of transferring trains in the dark
The sadness of feeling joy for a new pair of shoes
The sadness of things being one way and not any other
The sadness of spent time
The sadness of uncertainty
The sadness of disorientation upon waking up at eight in the evening
The sadness of scuff marks on new shoes
The sadness of an underground train
The sadness of suitcases
The sadness of not knowing what a single person you know is doing right now at this moment.

Simpsons Philosophy

I thought in the arms of a girl I might love that our bodies are servants who think they are sons. The mind is the master who looks for a ruler and finds only love and the concept of god (which we've ripped from the pages, devoured.) Hegel lies unread since college. Poetry is snack food. We write to believe in a God. If god isn't real then it's real and it's true: we are the gods of ourselves. I knew this since age 17 and it's truer with each passing year. With each passing year the time til I'm godless, de-bodied decreases. The concept of age is a construct death made. Was there ever a time before time? When watching The Simpsons, when Bart makes a universe, tiny, complete, by leaving bread mold in his bedroom: I cried.

Metaphors for New York City

I took her to the Flatbush Farm (more of a barn)
and dined on Bumble Tea and buttered mussels,
on a puck of pungent cheese and on pecans.
Beneath the strung up lights and fire escapes we
traded made-up metaphors for N.Y.C. It's a bowl
of broth with a fork in it. It's a stack of seashells
far from the sea. We filled in the blanks
that we left for each other and I stuck that stinky
cheese into my purse. Forgot it there for days.
Wrapped in waxed paper, it didn't smell at all.
Maybe it's a metaphor: for the city, or for love, or
for evenings steeped in something fragrant and forgotten.
Then forgotten. It's true what she said: I wish I were
more present. I'm lost in those alleys smirked
with graffiti; among silhouettes of friends pinned on
the sky blown blue with silence. I'm here and there,
there, there. This city is a patchwork of those bits
stuck in my mind and I am so hung up on her,
on metaphors and mussels; every corner of this city.

Killing Insects

I killed the bug with a shoe and she snapped a picture while I danced my fingers inside the sole to make sure the body was crushed. Months passed before we saw another. One another. We smashed it in a two part act, she finished it off, scraped the guts into the trash, and I told her all the things that I hadn't. Like who I met for drinks and what I did last Saturday and the story of my secret life I never told myself or anyone. We wrapped ourselves in silence like a plastic blanket: sterile, smothering. I touched her back. When I asked are you asleep she shrugged.

Fighting on the Phone

We talk and talk until I lose the i in it; am left with just one letter that begins my name and it is not enough although i try to make it so by signing every message with this cross. and she is just vibrations in my ear emitted from glass square bright with steel; the ache is much too animal to be of much or real importance. After all as I explained to students just today, the smartest of us homo sapiens declared that we descend from apes. Our second cousins: monkeys, as one 12-year-old explained to me. A surfeit of words and dearth of rancor blots out self, absolving nothing. Hate: at least it cleanses in its spit of heat. All I had: a stunted sense of self and deadened hall, maroon and beige, I realize now I see it like I grew up on that floor. A hall I studied for an hour for the first time in nine months of living here. The walls were beige, the trimming brown, except for one edge which was white. The plainness had no room for rancor but it welcomed words in smug conviction of their hollowed out insides (all the ones we use are soiled and salvaged, used again). Savagely, we find new ways to maul ourselves: the phone, the empty hall outside of an apartment.

4/2/2012

I swear the buildings are strung
up by floss in this city lit
by fever and florescence.
You'll memorize the neon lights
of different train lines if
you last here long enough. Last
night I kicked a rat or rather
felt one scurry on my foot. I
screamed but only outwardly
(I wasn't really all that shocked).
I wonder if there's any air here at
all that hasn't been inhaled and
exhaled by someone who's already dead.
Don't die without coming to live
on this island, outlined in bridges
and spray painted poems.

Things I Hope to Teach My Students

Science is an investigation of the world and thus us

New discoveries are made everyday

Science is often wrong and proves itself so with time

There's no wholly convincing explanation for life and existence as we know it

Scientists were once understood to be wholly men who sought to better understand God's creations. Scientific and religious beliefs can coexist.

There is joy in understanding food, trains, storms, illness, gravity, skyscrapers, population

Everything in the universe is made of the same stuff put together in different way

All stuff is attracted to other stuff. No one knows why.

Life is really complex

Thoughts while walking to the PATH at 6 a.m.

I'd rather live even briefly in the blue bruise night presses into morning, the smell of love still anchored on my body, wearing off in commute away from her; the city. Last night I dreamt a boat overturned in a torrent of glass water heaved into waves high as houses.

91 Fahrenheit

The first day of sumer came early, roaring in through the open windows of a slum school outside the big city. Kids sat sweating through their standard issue polos in their plastic schoolchild chairs, glazed eyes unseeing what they're reading. Today there are no questions about how the world started, or how it will end, and while they read I read "Here Is New York," a tribute to that piled up heap of metal heaved from the earth that sits in a glow of city heat five miles out our window, an essay written on a day as hot as this one.

I'm lonely in a contented, calm, adult, rational way that's foreign, unlike the wild fits of isolation that wrecked me, younger years. The tug of wishing I were somewhere far from here doing something incredible. Of having a backpack weighing me down, a destination lifting me towards somewhere, something. Hopping across Manhattan from one shitty exurb to another isn't enough. How can I be on top of the world on Sunday, and in it's grimy gutter, of 9 p.m. screenglare and wordfill by Friday. The loneliness of writing in unpublished, never-to-be-published drafts of a half-defunct, go-nowhere poetry blog your two best friends and girlfriend temporarily, sometimes read. Drinking mint tea while my three roommates sleep, indifferent about potentially waking up the older asian girl who hasn't fucked in years who shares my room, glaring at the screen, or it glaring at me, until sometime after nine and one 3 hour nap already packed away, when I'll x out tabs and close this pernicious oyster that saps my energy, and read a bit in the dim spill of light from the bathroom, listen to distant sirens and think about the madness not just near here in the projects, unspeakable madness I'll choose to tune out, but a few miles away in the most famed and fabled and thus underwhelming city I'll ever live in.

Before the Time of Music

Before the time of music, notes drifted about like the weather. Sometimes the sounds fit the scenery so well it was hardly noticed: clear chords as you awoke. Crescendoing symphonies behind a storm. In dissonance is when it was interesting. A circus ballad while you broke up with your lover. A funeral march while making love. The contrast illuminated living, cast it into bas relief in the neurons of the witnesses. The first man to harness music was a man whose first child died amid a flurry of chimed arpeggios. The first sounds captured were taps, the once irregular rhythm of life he learned to make himself with just a stick and stone. Others came later. Leather stretched over a ring of wood. Hollowed gourds filled with seeds. Musicians were seen as magicians who made the world around them bow to their pieced together creations which mimicked the natural noises so well they ceased to exist on their own. New instruments were constructed to make new sounds until only a few remained free. The spacious sound the wind makes. A heartbeat. Breath. The sound of waves. And silence.

Silence was heard as a noise before it was heard as the absence of noise. But no instrument however grand or complex could make it.

Music once gathered in big open places, like beaches and parks and plains, where there was so much music it gave the spaces a vibration like a fourth primary color, a fine dusting of sound. People gathered just to close their eyes and hear. Still sometimes you hear the echoes in a great place, a few feral notes baying for their brethren.

Brooklyn Public Library

At BPL the man besides you falls asleep, cruising slow-mo into his copy of The End
of White World Supremacy. Your best friend is dozing, too, nodding unattractively into the plastic bound paperback Jesus' Son. It's not about God or maybe it is but the prose is violent and lewd. Which is why you like it. Why you picked it out for her. Her dad is a preacher but she is a writer like I am, like you and we all want to be, in this city where even the sidewalks are made out of words, recycled and smashed up and churned out into The Hardest Material that Man Ever Made. Which isn't true, or I doubt it at least, And I doubt that you'll even look it up, knowing I know that you could if you cared to, on any of many screens in arms reach from your swiveling chair of adjustable height. Go ahead. Find out. Or intend to, like I will, but don't get around to it. Too many links, too many inked up arms to ever stand out in this city. Too much to know. To forget. All libraries feel the same. These books aren't even in English. I could live my entire life here and never be at home. That's why you catapult yourself across the sky, right? To be the strangeman on another blob of green smeared on this sphere. Mke the world feel new again like just being born. Fresh like a cut or a hit or a dunk in ice freezing water. Like crawling back in and then out of the womb one fucking more time. Your cousin kept hers, BTW, informs your mom via text. Her womb, that is. But she's still in surgery. Still got HPV, and cancer. So who'd you slap this weekend, half-blacked out from all the things you're "over with completely," like subject-verb agreement, long division. "If y'on't get it now you might as well quit!" and other things you'll never say. Have you, have you conceded yet that the world's just for a few? If y'aren't there yet you're like me but we'll get there evench. Keep cutting off the ends of words like phone calls to your mother and the portion of the day in which you give a shit. Don't try. It's like realizing you're fat. What is? Realizing you're ugly. Which is a lot like sitting in the Brooklyn Public Library next to a black dude reading The End of White Supremacy only now he's awake, and you're dozing.