I want you close

It's not that I don't feel close to you when you're not close to me (though that's true) it's just that I want you holding my hand when the man at the laundromat who used to teach chemistry in China pauses and says You teach China school tutor English I open school summer, summer and I want you to be there two blocks later when I burst into tears at the end of hopscotch squares I thought would go the length of the block but didn't. I want you in my white white sheets, newly bleached by the laundromat man's wife or daughter. I want you to tell me what you think about me paying the laundromat man's wife or daughter to bleach my previously less-white sheets I want you in my sheets.

Things I Never Called You

Chicken, duckie, cutie. Sweetheart or a real good fuck.
I never said I love you but it lived in my eyes when I looked at you,
looking away, love. My squash. My squishy. My seven-year-itch
with a cape of dark hair that sometimes was greasy. I never said
you were a freak in a good way, or in a bad way, or in bed. Some days
I was just too tired to not come see you, babe, baby girl, baby doll, pork chop.
You unwove my clothes, m'ija, and sewed the threads into the ground.
When I woke up, sown in your city, darling, I saw that your hands
were just covering mine all along. I saw that the city was beautiful,
beautiful. I'm sure that I called you beautiful, once, when the city was ours.

How It Ends

On the last week of school all the cockroaches come out from under the classroom sink and the heat starts to gather in dark smears above the boardwalk and the kids at Lincoln get dismissed at noon and melt out on the sidewalk and huddle around a run down van with tinted windows to leer at something smutty inside.

On the last day of school the roaches living underneath the classroom sink wake up and come out during 4th period and cause a riot. At noon the kids are dismissed and they melt out onto the streets, breaking up the smears of heat above the blacktop. 

In Memoriam (for Tyler)

We went to bed alone like we would tomorrow night
and the night after that and for every night until we died,
try as we would to change the way the world was.
I opened the window for the company of the breeze
and to raise the stakes of staying warm, pulsing, wet inside.
Outside the cars sung songs on the road and a siren
wailed about the state of things. I thought of you slipping
under blue-black glass of the James in May and the way
two years have slid by, unwound their cords around our feet.
I'm steeped in the memory. I'm seeing myself reflected
in the bits of shiny plastic fluttering in the street, you
in every twelve-year-old with a grin. Here we are and aren't.
You with a heart so big and carved of stone, sinking.
Me with time at my feet like crumpled jeans. There aren't
enough life vests to go around. I didn't know until now 
what it meant to dance, drenched in wind, with the imprint
of your words silk-screened on my skin, drowning.