27 miles of pneumatic tubing
to transport 97,000 letters a day
at 30 miles per hour
for more than 50 years

6 feet under.

A whole transportation system
sandwiched between
ambulance sirens
and subway trains.

From 1897 to 1953,
rocketeers handled
the 25-pound steel cannisters.
Even a cat got sent through.

Whoosh.

When the left speaker blows,
my spine shifts. My inner sense
of direction fluctuates
as the days shrink.
As my heart expands,

I will run through the fallen
leaves without amplification
soon. What has loosened
the wire? A cat? A mouse?
A bat? A louse?

Yes, I know the rhyme
needs to slant
more than that.

The last time
I asked if
you sell waterbeds,
you laughed me out the door
onto the icy street.

Waves of nostalgia
mistaken for nausea
overcame me as I swam away.

My inner ear and outer
edges have ached
for years.

Library patrons
are customers now. Patients—
clients beware. We’re all looking
to buy those words
we misheard

in stereo, those love lines
we forgot to sing
to sleep.

Take the walking cure.
Don’t say a word
about miles or hills or wind.
About urban wildlife
encountered along the way.

A tree talks to itself
with a German accent.
But when it warns neighbors
in the grove
of impending danger

(a hurricane or man
with an ax)
through the wood wide web
fungal network,
no accent can be detected.

Be prepared
to crush all rebar
poems. Grind them
into a fine powder
to sprinkle over

next week’s hoarding
of stanzas.
Don’t ask Siri.
She can’t help
you now.

The express train
won’t stop here.
The third rail knows
something about keeping
the fallen alive

by administering sweet juice
through hidden roots.
Take it
at face value—
be cured.

I survive another
anniversary of death.
I won’t swing censers loose
from their chains.

Sometimes all you need
is a title to tell the story.
And the title becomes too much
to bear without a witness
to tame all the stanzas
tumbling onto the track.

Then there’s the third rail.
Third Avenue, third river,
third act, third meal, third line
in the third stanza,

third child—I was his
number three (or so)
when I lived on the third floor.
So many mad women in the attic
to calm with a promise
no one wants kept.

I don’t just survive.
I prevail over mouthwash dispensers
in a Hell’s Kitchen diner
unisex bathroom.
I salute the man outside
Port Authority and his cardboard sign:

Gimme a dollar
or I vote for Trump.

I prevail over an unairconditioned C train
on a nasty hot August afternoon.
I salute the shoppers
inside Century 21 later that day.

Would my father have loved that pink sunset
over Jersey City?
Is he the one
who slides the dark curtain across?

These rhetorical questions
come wrapped in cotton
for safekeeping. I swear
the clouds visible from the plane
bringing me home
are cotton balls

that reek of rubbing alcohol.
I cringe. Which fear burns longest—
the one you admit to each day,
or the other one?

I’m thinking the Kinks,
not Van Halen.
Single-tasking,
without question.

Son Volt before Wilco.
Uncle Tupelo before everything,
of course. Ordinary events
happen in extraordinary ways

is not a slogan
to memorize
over coffee
while reading

about Johnny Thunderbolt’s
interrupted window washing
before Johnny Thunders
got smeared in

a Lower East Side alley
during a downpour. Before

that Midwestern singer
taunted him with
Johnny’s gonna die.
In the aftermath,

I’m thinking Thomas Wolfe,
not Tom Wolfe.
And Woolf before any Wolfe—
of course.

Self-conscious about the words
she chooses, silence hangs
a mesh net over the scene
outside the window.

Selfies taken on a pedestrian
bridge become art hung on a wall
inside a half-crowded,
half-empty coffee bar.

What would Virginia do?
She seeks to describe a world
without the self
by messing with pronouns.

Nobody’s fool
fools nobody.

She may need
to drop her phone
into a gutter,
use her naked eyes

to watch startled geese
speckle the northern sky.

I may need
to reread The Waves.
Give all pronouns a rest.
Name the thing itself.

Let cloud ingredients decide
crush or crash,
observe or obscure,
frame or release,

abstract or wing-shaped
and shrinking fast.

* Bernard in The Waves, by Virginia Woolf.

In this bright light,
I can see the scars
on your face.
Harsh but true.

Self-inflicted wounds
heal in a different key,
if they heal
at all. You were

a little flat,
my mother thought.
I remember a definition
of humility

that knocked the wind
out of me.
Don’t know where you were
that morning.

Love bites
from cupping
for 90 minutes or so
he says
to the woman
he’s known most
of his adult life.

She wants to believe
in something (or someone)
besides what the unreliable
narrator of her memories
whispers whenever
she gets close
to the water’s edge.

A pier, a bank,
a jetty, a buoy, a bridge
in suspension.

The voice
calms her
into a false
sense of relief.
They really do park
cars diagonally
on Circuit Avenue.

Two yellow crutches
abandoned on a lawn
in a front yard before dusk.

Four Steves
she knew biblically—
all addicts and alcoholics—now dead.

One by drowning, one by drinking,
one by overdosing, one by who knows.
Who still says “knew biblically”?

Six blocks left
to walk before
the street lights buzz on.

Eight memories of childhood summers
that distract her
from the steps left to take.

Here’s one:
The islander kids would scare her
with their dirty talk

about wet towels and spaces
she didn’t know
she was supposed to protect.

Decades later
she finds herself once again wanting
to scream in jealous fury

(more emphatically than Seth Tiven):
“Get off my island!”
As if she can really claim any place hers.

Who really owns the land
and water surrounding it all
is a question that needs no interrogation point.

So forgive us our no trespassing
signs and the sea glass
we excavated from the sand.

The soap bubble someone left on the edge
of the bathroom sink will burst.

I don’t think Emily died
a virgin the way my friend did.
For some (for me),
it’s been 37 years.

And he drowned
in his own pool.

I just swallowed a bitter pill,
literally. No plastic cups
for water and the prices
went up overnight.

I drink the coffee that should taste
18 cents better this morning

and think about wanderlust.
It’s an incurable desire
to run away from home
or to run headlong into it.

To get lost
or found.

Should have known something
was wrong when he said:
“My favorite movie is
Leaving Las Vegas.”

The young woman who cut my hair yesterday
wore a wide-brimmed felt hat

and tattooed sleeves on both arms
to match her long green hair.

I don’t write about them
because of my fear of my fear
of needles. Too chicken to get
the expiration date

stamp I threatened myself with
when I moved northwest. On my hip.

(He knew she was no good
when he saw her expiration date.)

July 27, 1990. August 31, 1991.
October 1, 1992. April 11, 1993.
November 19, 2002. August 27, 2012.
Or just too many dates to pick from.

Misplaced the cartoon
I stole the idea from.
How uncool is that.
And I will never give up

the period—in a text message,
or a handwritten letter, or any kind of text.

maybe a poem occasionally
when no punctuation will do

I could choose the nickname
“My” and pronounce it “Me.”
I could become more self-referential
than the world’s only corn palace.

I could change the pronunciation
of my hometown. No one would know.