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