She knows this dock—
each splinter, barnacle,
hurricane-spared stilt.

It is not a plank. It’s where she walks.
She knows how to dive,
has been doing it for years.

No easing into the wash,
she plunges in and is used to it
before others awake.

This is underworld—closets, caves, shelves,
trenches, forests, hydromedusa, brittle
stars, Painlevé’s camera.

This is where she should live—
she who is a sponge
is a sponge is a sponge.

She will never work a room
on dry land, works the ocean floor
with the precision of a jelly bloom.

To become exposed to air,
the rising sun. It is her death
to appear before all of us.

Metal crushes metal on a distant street, emergency
sirens approach
closer, closer. A muffled distortion underwater.

Leave her enough sea room.
She would rather synchronize her own sculls
outside a tank

than be confounded by a mirage of closing night roses
she can’t reach without a body.

She rides a 32-year-old bike
through the snow without crashing.
Does not get the wind

knocked out of her.
No gulping + gasping for breath
in the middle of Central Park

rush hour traffic. There’s no such
thing as Central Park rush hour
traffic these days. No such thing

as people + vehicles coming + going
in the tight confines of the alley
behind her apartment building.

It’s a lie.
It happens
all day + night.

Dumpster divers, garbage collectors, smokers, Lyft + Uber drivers,
candlestick makers + her.

It’s a lie—
those tire tracks
in the snow.

Her duende + guardian angel
have been traveling abroad so long
she can’t decipher fiction

from nonfiction, from the beautiful
friction between. She can’t remember
how to decode the darkness.

A 21-speed all-terrain Trek model
for the urban commuter
collects dust in the basement.

She has no idea
where she put the key
to that Kryptonite U-lock.

She really only knows how to run.
Cannot keep pace with her younger self,
who lately taunts + baits her

to take roads only her duende
(or is it her guardian angel?)
knows how to traverse.

She wears a newfound patience
as a waterproof poncho
against the elements.

Her younger self would have cut it
into pieces like some useless bedsheet
to twist into headbands

to trap the sweat of unexamined fear.
A rooftop dance party is another
euphoric recall episode

to record before it’s too late.
If she wrote a memoir,
would anyone read it?

Damn you, duende + guardian angel.
Get home soon. These elbows
have rested on this sill too long.

What if the branch is
rotted or hollow inside?
With one snap, I could tumble
backwards + tear through the air.

I would be heading dangerously
toward blue + green water
or gray + brown rock
between now + soon.

I could die
for god’s sake.

Then what exquisite freedom
to pierce the atmosphere
as a human knife
preparing to cut open the sky

to pull out its heart.
I see colors before words—

a viable warning in shades of yellow.
The top wisdom teeth pulled,
the Novocain wears off. I pray
I don’t get dry sockets

the summer I swim
in quarries + reservoirs.

New Order’s “Blue Monday”
plays on repeat. I won’t die tonight.
It’s not a Sunday. I was born
on a Sunday. I will die on one.

Blown away + beautiful, I fall
off the porch into the arms
of an oak tree.
No questions asked.

—————————————————————

Mahpiohanzia is defined as “the disappointment of being unable to fly” from John Koenig’s The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. Also see Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello’s poem “From the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.”

Even
as I do swoon
for you—you big City—
the Mississippi River makes
me laugh.

I try
to untangle
a muse
for me
from amuse
me. Till
their family
moved away.
At the
top of
our lungs,
we sang
Beatles songs.
Still without
bait, still
without results,
the creek,
then a
rural route
ditch. We
played freeze
tag and
tried to
fish for
trout, my
imaginary friend
and her
sister. When
I was
a child,
I ate
dirt.

First, you must empty the contents
of an elegantly frosted glass bottle
(“Chopin” in black script,
“POTATO VODKA” in block letters)
into the bathtub. This is
no bathtub gin tale.

Next, rinse it clean, reach
for that childhood
sea glass collection
you kept in an old
maraschino cherry jar. Fill the bottle
with your mermaid’s tears.

Create a dollhouse forest
with fresh Cuban cigars.
Use the empty wooden box
for the resonator to the guitar
you are constructing
in your sleep.

Come morning, position yourself
in front of the stage
that mysteriously appears
in Loring Park. Be transported
from the coldest day in Minnesota
so far this season to a summer evening

tucked in a crowd, standing
next to your best friend
inside the Entry circa 1995.
You share everything, even your name.
The first live Son Volt show ever.
Play “Out of the Picture” 8 times

in a row on that old stereo
you bought in 1991
to decipher the lyrics
to that Mats song better: “Die
within your reach . . . reach . . .
for the sky.” Sing along

to Syd Straw’s “Future 40s
(String of Pearls)” and
Toni Childs’ “Walk and Talk
Like Angels.” Oh, to be
“sitting on a swing
unfolding bits of string.”

No matter how loud
you belt out the words,
how much your voice carries
out the open window,
your neighbors won’t call
the police this time.

Open a box of running shoes,
lace them up, not too tight,
not too loose, take them on a test run
around Central Park. Repeat the loop—
this lap’s for your father.
Finish strong

along the penultimate stretch
of the old Wesleyan
X-Country course down Pine Street.
Fill the shoe box
with letters you received
in response to the thousands

you wrote during the first act
of your life.

Open the jewelry chest
filled with shrapnel
from Syd’s earring that exploded
on stage. Pause to recall
how she handed the pieces to you
as a souvenir in the middle of her set.

Scoop up the old New York City
subway tokens hidden
in the bottom drawer. You never did
get around to making earrings
from them. Dance, tuck, and roll down
a muddy hill. Go underground again.

Catch the #1 train to Last Stop!
Van Cortlandt Park! 242nd Street!

How many soul mates
haunt those Bronx
step streets
is the question
you refuse to relinquish
with a response.

Catch the last ferry
to Oak Bluffs. Spot
your grandparents’ old Eastville
cottage as East Chop
comes into view. Your mother’s
pipe organ playing clears the fog.

Pull your tattered copy
of No More Masks
off the shelf. Reread
Adrienne Rich’s “Women.”
You are one of three sisters too.
“Her stockings are torn but

she is beautiful.” Release
the sand from the cuffs

in your jeans. Never
drive a car. Return
to that midnight swim
36 years ago in a Connecticut pond
during a thunderstorm
with him,

so you never forget
what it means to be alive.
Everything gets dedicated
to sweet Sheri—only a week gone,
the crash still on repeat
whenever you closed your eyes.

Make your way back to 2021. Write
another poem before it’s all over.

In the dream, we’re riding
a Metro-North train
en route to a bold past
we know we can’t return to.

I read through college journals
looking for clues
like an unskilled detective who fears
what she might want to uncover.

Back then, I was desperate
for a replacement to escape
the sting of a broken
18-year-old heart. I scrawled:

“I want to know,
is it going to hurt?”

Little did I realize how that craving
would morph and consume me, how
the boundary between stage and audience
would dissolve before closed eyes.

In the dream, my phone slips
beneath the seat.
You find a cluster
of them on the dirty train car floor.

None mine. We laugh so hard
we’re sobbing.

We came so close:
The dancing, the long
drawn-out drunken hugs, making faces
at each other in the loud flying saucer

shaped dining hall
perched on a Connecticut hill.

That incident
when you bit me
on the neck. A slap
in the face that never occurred.

We signed up for that intro
to oceanography class together.
We thought the ocean meant
the Jersey Shore:

body surfing, gambling dens,
shoobies and bennies, Cape May
diamonds, beach badges,
Skee-Ball, boardwalk

saloons, meditating
under the stars.

Not upwelling, transform
faults, surges, gyres,
the reproductive habits
of limpets and sea worms,

or the truth
about the Coriolis effect.

In the dream, we’ve left city scenes
behind. In the dream, we know
you are dying. We refuse
to let that knowledge ruin the ride.

In the interval between winter storms,
I walk into Loring Park
in search of a moment to claim.

As I make tracks on what may,
or may not, be the pedestrian path,
I nearly trip on a spherical object

covered in snow. I brush it clean
with my glove—a diving helmet
made of copper and brass.

So many questions
I can’t answer. It looks so old,
predating Jacque Cousteau,

even Jean Painlevé.
No seahorses to study
in the ice-covered pond.

I drop to the frozen ground,
place the found object in my lap
and wait to be transported

to the glorious underwater wreck
of sister creatures escaping
the burden of pregnancy.

Tucked between the page
where she describes “doom eager”
(Is it really an Icelandic term
or from a line in an Ibsen play?)
and a haunting black-and-white photo
of her performing “Lamentation,”

there’s a scrap of writing—
an attempt to recapture
four precious days and nights
spent in Iceland. And something else
about a ferry horn blasting long ago,
how its voice is its whistle.

What compelled me to reach
for Martha’s memoir
is as much mystery as
the collection of red herrings
bleeding into one another
on the yellowed paper.

This is where the earth opens up.
Don’t wear your coat inside
the Quonset hut, or
you’ll be cold outside.
It starts gradually, a slight shift
in color in the night sky.

We do the Peanuts dance,
stomping our feet
on the viewing deck to keep warm.
Someone has an app
to locate constellations.
A celestial ridge, a fluorescent aura,

a message best decoded
with a long exposure.
Inside Reykjavík’s Stofan Cafe,
a couple speaks rapid Italian
and sips strong coffee.
I think about bodies again.

It’s so American to hate your body.
I’m so American learning how to love.
I tremble, I shutter, I turn a corner
onto a boardwalk in the dunes
where you suggest
we both get it over with.

When I close my eyes
on an overseas plane, I see places
I’ve never visited come into focus.
I smell mortality in those lava rocks.
No solar plasma will go unnoticed.
The sun is drooling again.

It goes on and on
about tattooed buildings,
how the moonlight tastes
like a lilac halo,
how vertigo anchors me
to the hot ground, and

I’m reminded steam is not a sin.

entering Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello’s
poem “Ode to This Small Joy.”

A giraffe is staring at me
outside my living room window

under the moon I can’t see
but know is there.

A giraffe is humming
and batting its long lashes at me.

I pick up the melody:
Leonard Cohen’s “Anthem.”

I join in. We hum past midnight
deep into the wee hours. I swear I hear

it whisper “There’s a crack
in everything” as day breaks

across that magnificent neck.
“That’s how the light gets in.”