As It Turned Out

The sinister thwacking in the night turned out to be the cord to draw the blinds,
tracing circles in the steady stale exhale of the AC unit, tapping the wall. The self-
portrait turned out as well as it could have. The drinks turned out to be a date after all.
After all that time we spent together I still didn't think I knew her at all. It turned out
we weren't in love. It turned out there isn't a purgatory, according to the Catholics.
The cough turned out to be cancer, returned. The last day of school turned out to come
sooner than I ever thought. Her last day was sooner than we all had expected. Her son
would turn out just fine, we all said, as he cried silently in the first pew of the too-big
chapel, empty even with our crowd. I turned my face up towards the light, hoping
for anything, anything. I turned out my pockets at security. Empty. I turned into stone.
I turned into crystal, lit from within, dim like the salt lamps they sell
at museum gift shops, touted for healing properties; in truth just a desk-light
that's slowly eroding, leaving a film of white dust on your fingers when touched.  

edits

I ordered a mocha on a whim and wasn't sure why until
I watched her make it. She scooped the chocolate, tamped
the coffee, held all the pieces into place and wiped
the steam wand with a damp white cloth, then held
my drink to it, filling the milk with air. I mistook
the pattern  in the foam for hearts; I had said too much
by the time she slid my drink across the counter and
I stood in my own silence, looking down, thinking how
everything I do is a love letter: stroking the hollow of spoons
when I wash them; wiping down the table with a sponge,
making staccato music with my fingers on a keyboard,
begging my girlfriend for forgiveness. I don't know the language
of love, I explained. Only the braille of my footsteps in snow,
a choreography of errands criss-crossing the city, my body
a skywriting aircraft, careening wild across the sky.

Dissolution (found poetry, circa 2008)

overcast, the sidewalk shadowed in gray and textured like over easy eggs from a skillet

mostly i am bitter that the words feel so much stickier, more stuck

than usual.

and the fear of premature decline hasn't left, either, murmuring somewhere deep

getting older and fatter and stupider.

and those evening hours stretch on so long and monotonous and monochromatic when it's cloudy

an aging purgatory.

anxious without reason, my heart beats fast while i am sitting still

my hamstrings aching for exercise

as my brain, lethargic, begs to entangle my legs in blankets for days on end.

to do lists, usually my spine in the whirlwind tornado of obligations, seem frivolous and irrelevent

and i'm convinced the perma-crust on my floor ebbs and flows, pulled by some ether-gravity unseen,

waning and waxing around me in time lapse frames

as i wrestle clean sheets on my bed compulsively once a week.

a school year of accumulated junk looks around at me,

like kindergarteners at show and tell around a negligent teacher:

a purple bottle of bubbles shaped like a bunny from easter,

plastic kids' meal toys from burger king

a stuffed horse from a themed party

my uncle's ancient beer stein, a relic from home,

a dinosaur kite, unflown, hanging limp from a pipe on the ceiling.

sometimes when i'm alone with the sand and the waves

i can't wait to fall apart into infinite tiny pieces and scatter

washing over the earth and the oxygen in my lungs diffusing far far far into the clouds

urging me to crawl beneath the surf and dissolve.

and i wonder if dissolution is the desolute solution to resolutions, or if i'll ever be resolved.

Knife Bright

The way there's too many questions
you could ask the people you pass
on 42nd Street so you ask none. Half the reason, always,
you aspired to be a doctor or a teacher:
you're allowed to ask the questions.
Supposed to. How long as this been happening?
What would help fix the problem? Last night
you found your friends curled up on pool chairs,
like mummies, at 4 in the morning.
You'd fallen asleep on the couch inside,
 the TV screen blue on a classical music
channel. How you couldn't sleep because
of the stars. Couldn't remember the last time
you saw them, made a mental note and lodged
it with the growing pile behind your heart: leave
the city. Find someone. You wonder
about that sentence. Find someone. What it says
about the girl you love. You never think,
anymore, that you found it. Stopped picturing
raising kids. Going back and forth on who you
picture, now. Stop kidding yourself. Do
right by her but don't look into anyone's eyes
and lie. Keep finding yourself under stars
in the dark, startled by the shooting ones,
knife bright, slicing the sky like the rest
could fall out of the dark fabric, loosed
by the incision, both the questions and the answers.

Snake

I swipe right desperately, dreaming
of love behind glass. Swerve
left, dodge the sodden mattress
on the Jersey Turnpike,
heartchoked as we drive on
through the pouring rain. Turn UP, 
my students jeered in 2nd period,
earlier today, volleying the N-
word, F-word, words
I didn't recognize, up
above the desks, my head,
threshold for patience,
lately grown thin,
underfed like the snake
in the back of my room
(named Ronnie by students,
a nod to the Jersey Shore
character). That thing never eats
when I feed him dead mice
that I warm in a beaker of water,
and I never feed him these days.
I'm tired of teaching. Worn
to the bones of my face
which I feel beneath flesh at the end
of the day when I'm two hairs away
from losing it, all of it, totally.
Somedays my pants fit and
somedays they don't and by some
neural path I tread as a kid, this
is the ruler I use to measure
my worth, stuck in some
rut I dug years ago. I want out
of this classroom, this glass box,
this body, this city where trains
snake underfoot to take me
one dump to another. I read
the manifesto of a murderer,
a neatly typed PDF I pulled up
on my smartphone, a rambling
account of each year that took him
towards killing. What chilled
me was the way I felt the same
blind rage at my own loneliness,
at times. A whiff of it now. My
eyes are mirrors that shine that fear
back at myself until I'm wrapped
in it. I decide the mattress would have
killed me if I'd hit it, going sixty
on the road out of this place.  

Blooms

Everyone's sending something important at the post office,
laboring over the licking of the envelope, adhering to the still-preferred
sealing (ceremonial) of the paper vessel even in the era of self-adhesive
stamps and self-seal flaps. Sending mail is an act of faith. Standing
in a line is an act of faith. Stepping outside is an act of faith.
Getting out of bed each morning is an act of faith. Kids are afoot:
a black girl, a white girl, and a Hasidic Jew with long blond locks
sticking out of his yarmulke. It's five and the call to prayer comes on somewhere,
must be set as an alert on someone's smartphone. All the sad music the world can't
evoke what it does in me. Seeing my grandfather prostate, praying. The only thing
he'd ever bow down to and even then rarely, the holiest of holidays, maybe.
He has his own mythology about how the way he came to be. Royalty of the mud,
roots spread round the world, blooms he'll never see: gay granddaughter,
Simon carrying the torah to read it on the altar, Momo climbing mountains
in wilderness rehab in Utah, his blackness no bloom in my grandfather's eyes. 

Slowly Growing Older Than the People on TV

All knife and no incision, all dog-eared corners and no words on the pages.
All branch, no leaves. Four left turns make a square. A square stretched out
is a circle. Circle the thoughts you want to keep and pin them close to your heart.
Google it, google it. You're slowly growing older than the people on TV.

the city and the stillness

i live in what once was the largest city in the world, a sprawling empire that's crawled its shadow over three islands that meet at a river, bored through the earth that gave rise to it, riddling it with tunnels that one day will fill. it can't go on forever you know; always predicting the ends of things, only seeing as far as the end of our noses as far as history cares. i grow cold thinking about this city growing old on me, it's subway trains stalling. when the storm wiped them out for a week or two the stillness was eerie, a city laid wayside by the swell of the sea, a warning, no doubt about it. 

Call to the Gynecologist

There's something sweetly pleasurable in a series

of answerable questions: Name. I spell it. F as in Frank,

D as in dog. Address. 109 9th St. Is there an apartment number?

Third floor, I say. Social, the woman abbreviates,

in her expert question-asking voice, coming in clear

through the ether, and I know what she wants and I give it, 

the numbers like a nursery rhyme I can say without thinking, 

like driving to work on autopilot. Insurance, she says, 

and I read from the card in my palm. You said United Healthcare, Oxford? 

That's correct, I say, a perfect simulacrum of my mother,

phone tucked between her shoulder and her ear as she did the dishes.

I have no good reason to call the gynecologist. It's been three years

since I’ve been, three since I slept with a man, and nearly

twenty-five, now, since I was born – reason enough to have a

blow out party, which I’m already in the midst of planning.

Facebook prompted: Date. Time. Location. Guests.

Then suggested my cousin Laura, and for an instant, I forgot

she was dead. Cervical cancer. Date of birth, the woman asks on the phone.

I tell her. This morning I left to get coffee and saw a man prostrate

on the sidewalk outside my door. I thought he was fixing something

underneath a car. Then I saw he was thrusting his body against the cement,

moaning, his wild glazed eyes meeting mine for a moment as I walked by.

Things aren’t always what they seem. Nobody gets an irregular pap

smear and thinks they're going to die. You’re all set, the woman

says, on the phone. I'm all set? I ask, and she says it again,

and that’s that. When I hang up I check the weather on my phone,

flipping through the cities that I’ve been to, each with its own

background showing the weather. Its cloudiest where I am

but cloudy almost everywhere, and in Savannah, it’s pouring rain,

white drops like tiny incisions, slicing down the glass screen, going nowhere.

Love Letter to the Girl Who Makes My Coffee

I ordered a mocha on a whim and wasn't sure why until
I watched you make it. You scooped the chocolate, tamped
the coffee, held all the pieces into place and wiped
the steam wand with a damp white cloth before you held
my drink to it, filling it with air. I mistook the pattern in
the foam for hearts; I had said too much by the time you
slid my drink across the counter and I stood in my own silence,
looking down, thinking how everything I do is a love letter --
touching the hollow of spoons when I wash them, wiping
down the table with a sponge, the staccato music of my
fingers on a keyboard, the braille of my footsteps in snow,
choreography of my chaotic errands criss-crossing the city,
a skywriter in a small aircraft, careening wild across the sky.

On Returning to the City From Ossabaw Island

Last night's dishes sit haphazard in the sink, stacked 

in flame-fanned exuberance after we hosed out the bonfire,

the steam billowing up through the Spanish moss, obscuring

the stars, the comedown how an astronaut must feel upon returning

to Earth, even in weightlessness weighted by dread, the end

of being outside it all, in a place where you can count on a two hands

the number of humans there with you  – back to the masses,

the jam-packed, stacked like dishes in cupboards upwards, 

back to doing laundry, meeting deadlines, reading emails,

grading papers, paying bills. Play your cards right , play

your cards right and you might get somewhere; did you

know? It takes 40 gallons of sap to make one of syrup.

Imagine watching the earth from space, the curved 

line where sunrise slides over its surface. Alarm clock,

tea kettle, coffee grinder, toothbrush: ordinary morning

chorus. The astronaut in reentry to the atmosphere would see

the panorama breaking, the earth obscured by earth.

The Mug, The Beasts, The Ruins

Two strangers’ faces plastered on my coffee cup, man and woman smiling,

the caption economical: Hawaii 2004. White mug, white teeth, white-blonde hair, the photo slightly overblown, the background black as the letters beneath. Whoever

ordered it on holiday or honeymoon, most likely never thought

it would end up in my hands, here on an island inhabited only by one, a 101-year-old woman, who spit on this land at age nine and said she’d never love it,

an island overgrown with vines and Spanish moss, which hangs from the trees,

gridding the air, giving it a texture and grain. Not Hawaii. Something else. What else

rests here: two dozen rusted trucks and vans, give or take, their hoods agape

in deathbed confession, small plants growing from their sunken rooftops.

A litany of washers, dryers, tires, bikes, spokes, trunks, drums, unnamable

metal things rusting to dust, one boat. The palm fronds stir, then still. A skiff

roars somewhere, distant. Birds take turns with their trills: fe-ver, fe-ver,

fe-ver. On the far side of the island the uneven ground gives away

an old Indian dumpsite: pottery shards, oyster shells, white like bones in the road,

a broken conch hatchet punched through two times where a stick used to go,

human remains: a different kind of landfill, to be sure. What else: the armadillos, ancient in their prehistoric armor, wild boars and half-tame donkeys, the ghosts

of dreamers, decades old,  a hundred types of birds. The mug, the beasts, the ruins:

all sinking deeper into unplanned places. The birds in flight above.

A Hip A Hip

At some point her hands became hands.

It spread: legs legs, ribs ribs, a hip a hip.

Eight lips lips, all kissing.

We became a pile of parts on a bed,

lefts and rights, rights and wrongs,

untouched by sun, limber, limp,

one foot wrapped in a damp magazine

like a pile of deli meat, left out in the heat,
beaded with sweat, dripping.

Kill/Keep

When a week had passed the most I could do

was clean. I did. I dumped the whole drawer of silverware into the sink
and rubbed each spoon like it could come to life and love me back.
I moved the couch to make space for my sadness,
and swept all the dust and the dirt and bits of glass

that had taken up life in the untended corners.

I roamed the rooms with a bag and sorted my things

Kill/keep, kill/keep, getting rid of everything I could.

That night I took out eight white bags of trash.

Ghosts. What you can live with, what you can live without.

The emptiness exacerbated mine. I put away the dishes

just fill to the cupboards. I dropped a brand new bowl
and it exploded on the counter, one white shard
slicing a C into me, in the pale skin of my wrist,

like it wanted me dead. In that moment I missed

you so much I thought I might spill from the cut, 

turn inanimate, turn to dust, turn to silver.
Then the C filled with blood. I was fine.

Dream

When I woke
I thought I was the sea

so I cut off my clothes,
but found I was made out of sand,
and I watched the bits of me get blown away. 

Falling Out

You see when I jumped in I never planned on being lifted in reverse, slow-motion from the pool, ripples racing inwards and reforming beads of water, flying up in perfect arcs and back to where my falling body had disturbed them from the surface, my body flying up back towards the diving board from where I came, hoisted as if by pulleys in a cheap theater production, the insides of my thighs shaking with nerves that said this wasn’t in the script, the faces at the pool all turned towards me like tiny satellites, honed in on  my body as it turned and walked with my command off the diving board, taking painstaking steps down the ladder one rung at a time, arriving at the concrete shaking, shrugging with apology to the line for what happened, dripping, head hung, flushed.