"Do you want to Lindy?"

Tandem Charleston doesn't know the word loneliness;

Lindy Hop doesn't know fear. "I never liked rollercoasters,

actually." (And neither do I). But the anticipation of a night

out dancing requires only to fall into the rushing wind
of a swing out, land in the arms of someone human.
Demonstrate West Coast in the street with me. Practice
tuck turns in the parking lot. Show me how to swivel

on the sidewalk. Tell all your secrets to strangers, shiver

on wet picnic benches beside the suddenly familiar scent

of sweat and smiles and sarcasm. Midnight means my feet ache,

means my mind runs loops of jazz, means we are just two empty

beer cans beside two empty soda glasses, but I am entirely full.

New Pennies, Old Pigeons

I was born under a halogen bulb,
misplaced constellation of the old country
and new whiteness. Childhood was a spiced
picket fence, a gentrified tenement,
and here I learned to want,
the way guns just need to be emptied
into the pink breasts of pigeons.

Mother was a dress form, satin like custard,
the fantasy of stockings and the thighs
beneath them and father ripped both
nightly, nails like pen nibs and curses.

If I had more seamstress and less poet,
more feathers and less whisker, maybe
I could have wanted less like a bullet
and more like the bird.

Why save something so sad

I wish I could turn invisible but
I have to wear my pajamas and
show up at your doorway crying,
three in the morning, full of shame
and wishing I could give you
something more worthwhile
for your time. And you say, "I hate
to see you upset," like I hate to see
the sky grey on Halloween and like
I hate other things that I haven't
learned yet because I don't know
myself in this place or anywhere really.

The Mathematical Language of Cats

On the night we met in the studio, the open window

sang late summer love songs to the purr of the street.

Honestly, you intimidated me: the coolest girl in school.

All I could think to say was, "You remind me of someone else."

As you laughed you set your cigarette to smoking

and handed me a beer off the sill; we waited. 

That winter, you went into the convenience store while I waited

on the sidewalk, warming my hands in the glow of the windows.

My brain reeled from the drink and the cigarettes you'd smoked

like you were trying to melt all the snow on Main Street,

like you'd burn enough matches to be somewhere else

where the wind wouldn't howl like cats on the way back to school.

The next summer we tried to grow up. I taught middle school

while you worked at the grocery store, read novels, and waited

for the boy you loved to treat you like someone else. 

But at night we could sit on the porch, eating dinner by the window

and watching the stray cats run the length of Oberlin Street.

We laughed through our self doubt, the cigarettes smoking

between your fingers just for the sake of watching them smoke.

Then the year when I slept on your couch, a year spent driving streets

and drinking tea in your family's kitchen after school,

a year that we wrote each other out of what we were waiting

for, a year that we sat in my living room with no windows,

and we never said what we meant, talked of anything else.

The truth is that every cat I've ever owned lives with someone else

now. It isn't that I don't love them, but they always dissolve like smoke

while my back is turned, onto the sills of other people's windows.

Eventually I knew I could never go back to teaching school.

I wonder what you do when we don't talk, whether you wait

for me to show up outside, howling like a cat in the street,

whether you remember that May-purple night on Oberlin street

where we ate dinner on boxes packed by someone else,

two people who couldn't be us. Or maybe you think of how you waited

for me to disappoint you by never getting tired of smoking

in your parents' attic even when we knew there was school

in the morning. Maybe you just sit, reading, in your window.

This summer, before I left for good, I parked on your street; we took up places and smoked

on the porch, each wishing outselves someplace else. You might teach school,

I am just waiting for what's next, while your cat curls on the sill of the open window.

August 23, 2016

The dogs burst forth from their cage only
to settle on the sofa: auburn heaps of
sleep, premonitory visions of autumn.
Somewhere here there are childhoods,
but having lived mine elsewhere, I see
only a quiet stretch of questions and
singularity like the whirring of a quilt being
washed again and again in another room's
laundry.

Vacant

I. When we returned to the house, spiders had shored up the entrance.

His fingers tore through their handiwork, mouth opened: "Ah, just there,"

a round yellow pearl beneath his bootheel and then key in lock, opened.

II. Having been to the roof, he tells me there are sparrows nesting in the attic

and counts the obituaries he's read since last winter, "She was only fifty-two.

How many years do I have left?" His eyes search heaps of grey insulation.

III. Under the rotting garage, tree roots have slithered and heaved their way upward.

Squirrels are tunneling in under the eaves. "They'll get in eventually," he laments,

recounting.

IV. The basement is dry and full of empty corners, propped up pine, a century's

carvings, and a rodent's beginnings of electrical fires to come. In the backyard 

someone has placed clusters of smooth golden stones, and the plants grow.

Sublimation (June 30th)

It was Spring and I was fourteen when I learned

the word "catharsis," a word like a flower bud.

Later, seventeen and wreathed in symbols, it

was a pair of pretty eyes sinking to the bottom

of a prettier river. But tonight, it's my car, open

windows, the radio (was it on or off, each was

worse than the other), the illegal parking space 

across from your parents' house, the sudden 

knowledge that I could not contain my feelings.

To stare face first into the sublime is to confront

terror, to lose oneself in the torrential swell of all, 

become only waves. This isn't what we want,

better a seashell, something to hold to the ear 

and listen to the hush of distant times, at most

a map stitched from longing and struggle.

The truth: it is my smallness that allows these
floods to throw my slivers of floatsam about
the surf, but it is my smallness that ties me
to you. I am no more a masterpiece than
a photograph is a painting, than a leaf is a tree,
than a memory is a memoir. And yet, I am here,
my car with open windows, the thrum of silent
radio, and the never ending scratching in the
insufficient cage of my ribs. There is greatness
in this world and now this thing inside of me
can feel it.