Light Being Light
At nineteen, sharing the bed with a
blind woman from the shelter and her black
cat, too sick to speak on my worst
days, of course I was afraid.
Each dawn the smarting sky
froze into an endless pool of
gold-flaked ice, its vast twisted corpse
hiding a corpse. When I approached
I saw myself suspended in resin.
Jinx! I needed nothing to
know that I was gone.
Light being light, I saw what I saw.
Men being men, they left me with
nothing but my body.
Of course I screamed. Of course
people didn’t hear. My death was
quick and unspectacular. The first
responders were like yeah we
see this all the time. Blind woman
told me what her husband did to her
until the morning light indicted him.
Violets grew like bruises in the yard
while soil sat unwatered,
xeric and sightless. I’d been too
young for years and was happily
zombified. The future was over. Even I knew.
Sea Level
You bit your nails to bone
that summer. It was the year of homemade bombs
and your bullshit bank teller job, snipers on the roof
of the Hilton Garden Inn. You hugged me, but
your face was hard
when I saw it. Bituminous. August
in my rented backyard. The bees are dying in waves
but that day, there were so many. In your final city,
the spines of streetlights melt,
scoliotic, into the sidewalks. Soon,
the experts drone, this place will be uninhabitable.
I have forged an island
atop your absence. Each day I wake
closer to sea level. It was never supposed
to be like this. You’re dead; I’m
reading Rilke on the roof. Night rises
like heat from the sidewalk. The expressway glares
back at me in heterochromic beats, red, white, red,
white, cells of blood, breathing. I don’t write
these days. God can’t love you
the way I do, will never know you
like I know you. You’re a casual fan of the future
but you don’t want to live there, like a city you know
is too dirty, too busy. Living fossil,
fata morgana, I told you the truth. This world a sum
of all I’ve lost and all that’s left. This emptiness
Oulipan. You’d rather die
than live with it.
In this alone we differ.
Bad Nostalgia
“I dreamed I forgot you/but to dream you was remembering.”
—Leila Chatti, “I Dreamed I Forgot”
It’s a privilege to say goodbye. This is what I told
myself when I woke and learned you were gone, back before I knew
I would survive. I was young then, alone
in a lab-grown womb, no mother nor human proxy to speak of.
Learned the uses of a body in a windowless room.
I’ve got bad nostalgia for it all. Loneliness made sense then.
Not now, among the living, pretending I never left.
It’s okay. I can’t complain. I go to work, go to school,
come home, say I’d rather kill myself than go
to the grocery store, and go to the grocery store.
This is not to say I am insincere. I mean
it all. I climbed to the rooftop
because I wanted to fall. Been touched
by so many strangers, I can’t bear it from the people I love.
Like a dead language, I want to be known
but I don’t know how. Can’t stop making plans
for the past, can’t bear the filthy aperture between my legs,
the angry white light of the world as it reopened for me
but not you. Last I saw you, leaves drifted, hypnotic,
to the icebound ground. Corner of your mouth
occupied by a cigarette, the other a joint,
smoke pouring from each orifice like an apartment fire,
you said Some things never change and I agreed,
although this did. You are never alive in my poems.
For this, I cannot forgive myself. Last night, I had a smoke
on the roof and thought of you,
our last apple cider, November then and now, autumn air
so sharp my blood slowed to a crawl like commuters
in the one-way tunnel of the heart, cold as the night you told me
you felt like you were dying, which you turned out
to be right about, if only just that once.
[Years of pelvic floor therapy]
after Diane Seuss
Years of pelvic floor therapy and I still have to stop everything sometimes
to make sure I don’t piss myself, nobody ever tells you these things, Oh
don’t get gang raped you’ll be on the verge of pissing yourself for the rest
of your twenties, sage advice although it went unfollowed,
even now the mawkish smell of the attic somehow finds me, I do not want
to inspire pity so much as revulsion, I want people to despair
like I despaired when I couldn’t run, could barely walk, each stair
a newly unwrapped razor against muscle, now that I’m back I sometimes think
I dreamed it all, how horrible, I could never
live like that, but I did, people said If I were you I’d kill myself and thought
they were being kind, it was batshit, I had a boyfriend for a year
but the entire time I was too sick to fuck, it was like he was my beard
or something, we lay like unwed Mormons because he was afraid to hurt
me, him with his shirt off, me pantless, together we made one person, clothed.
Sewer Slide
Fuck being a poet I wanna be a TikTok chick
who never says what she means
for fear of going unheard un
-alive, sewer slide, that’s all poetry is
anyway, crass euphemism, sidling
up to a stranger and smirking You know
what I mean as if conferring a
tiny curse or secret handshake,
like prostitution but worse, cheaper,
unsolicited— my medical debt got sold to collections
last year so now
I sit and let my phone ring itself dead, pennies
on the dollar I’m assuming but
I’m dying to know how
much my suffering is worth
in retrospect rubbernecker in the thick
of my own wreck—
don’t get me wrong I’m still beholden
to wants can’t clean my teeth without
sticking the brush into
my uvula and making myself gag I mean
after all these years I still don’t know how else I’m
meant to feel clean
Road to Joy
5 Central Ave.
Found you in the bathroom at the
house party, sky bruising over with new sun,
drunk, crying. When you came
back downstairs, you didn’t speak. Up
the street, your old apartment, with
rickety windows and no
insulation. Came to my conclusions,
left you alone. Bought flowers
before you died, then after, sleeping
in your bed to smell you, stuck in
remission, bending to the crowd. Their
fangs shone as they called your name, beds
leaden with the timeless sin of the
living. I’m a man on the moon in this city,
never not thinking of you, cemeteries
muttering your name, me humming
along, learning the words. Yes, I’m
learning to live again. The world is wide,
only my skin between us. Lying awake
in the place where you died—it’s
brutal. It’s a gas. It’s morning.
Targeted Advertisement #1
Do you dream of losing do you dream of the harm
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Most people don’t like to think about the
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No amount of naps takes away the
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Do the children dream of the harm
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of sleep
Stage Kiss
I couldn’t leave bed the first time you kissed me hell
I could hardly kiss you back I’m nobody
now but if you wanted me I could make it work
I’m a pushover like that, a sucker for skinny boys who look gay
(remember when you told me you made out with
another man, felt dirty afterwards, never came up again)
when I was too tired to talk we watched subtitled television
I felt like a fucking Victorian child
you drew my curtains when the light hurt
you drew me how you saw me unsexy and supine
I wanted you however you wanted me but your hologram
flickered when I got too close my whole life spent
cute but not pretty, who gives a fuck (me) you read
my poems and pretended to be interested
showed me your paintings and said it pissed you off
when people compared you to Basquiat even though
he’s one of your favorites, heard from a mutual friend your new
plan is law school, last we spoke like normal people I said
my couch had your name written on it, last we spoke you said
it’s not like that, I care about you, it’s not like that, now I’m dancing
in a yellow dress that never fit me right, dancing how
I never could when you were mine, tugging
your teeth from their gums, I think
you fucked this up but I won’t know for sure
until the next time you want me (which you will even if it’s not
until you get a gig in the city or see my name at a bookstore)
the last vowel of your name raised like house lights after a show
script wasn’t great but the actors did the best they could you know
