someone I would have fallen in love with
if we had met properly
sings about a murder

not a lethal act
not a swath of black
coating the sky

a murder of roses
as if petals
might become wings

to propel whole gardens
stems thorns and all
to flock overhead

a green roof raised in celebration
a flying carpet ride
through the seasons

a hothouse helicopter
that hovers protectively
over the city at midnight

the surfer's organic
pink crown
survives the ride

Another Lyft meet and greet gets going
in the back room of the coffee bar
where she goes
to record peripatetic truths.

She would join the group
if she had a license.
If she had a license,
she would lose her identity for good.

She’s a good passenger.
Hasn't puked in the backseat
in decades. One night

several Junes ago,
she hails a taxi
outside Bubby’s
(when it was still in DUMBO).

The cabbie asks her
about her evening.
She tells him about walking across
the Brooklyn Bridge

with a crowd
of fellow Poets
House advocates.

It's the year Terrance Hayes reads
Vladimir Mayakovsky’s “Brooklyn Bridge”
under the western tower:

“I clamber,
in pride,
upon Brooklyn Bridge.
As a foolish painter
plunges his eye,
sharp and loving,
into a museum madonna,”

Every straight woman,
gay man, there
swoons. She is not immune.
It's her first time

laying eyes
on such a beautiful genius.
Even her future favorite living poet
stirs a tad with jealousy.

The taxi driver wants
to chat. He tells her
he likes her dress—
a black and rose floral number

with an old-fashioned bodice
and full skirt.
She's even wearing heels.

He sounds enchanted
by her enchantment
with living poets who know how
to summon the spirit of Walt Whitman.

Everything rises up a notch.
He senses her levitated state,
asks her to have a drink with him
as he stops the cab in front of her hotel.

He can be off duty for her.
He repeats he loves her dress.
It's been a long time
since she's heard these lines.

Still, she knows these are lines.
The medallion number lights up
the way they used to.

her life is a poem
she writes on a scrap of paper
to be folded in half
then folded again
and again and again
till her story gets so thick
with 3D virtual reality
it can walk off by itself
without aid of stanzas
or punctuation
with only density and repetition
to feed on
and dreams of a delicate paper swan
that may fly away
only to return a nightmare
of a mute one made of glass
that falls off the table
and breaks her rape scene in two

in this version
I am a dress maker
with a tape measure
wrapped around the neck
not pulled taut

I wear my black tee backwards
all day not inside-out
not realizing the boat neck
and plunging scoop back
might rebound

a white Peter Pan collar
haunts me on cool nights
when I'm not in the mood
to go back there
where everything began

one more garment
to hang
steampunk book cover
to design
boot to unlace

one more open safety pin
to pick off the floor
before it's too late
and another passive aggressive building
refuses to take a stand

one lone tree house
lights up an entire August sky

fall crashes
the eighth month
to drop hints
of sudden
and not so sudden death

soon Bob Staake's hell train
New Yorker cover art will fade
into the annals of another
record-breaking heatwave
storming the ever teeming underground

when the cat scratches your forehead
and leaves a lightning bolt
within striking distance
of the hairline
it's time to resuscitate the mantra

I don't believe in signs
I don't believe in lines
I don't believe in nines
I don't believe in zines
I will always believe in pines

then again the throat
will tighten around
the words that no one says
while these fly out
too ridiculous and free

I remember borrowing
a pogo stick from a girl
named Martha one Good Friday
morning in a snowstorm.

I pogo up and down the empty street,
addicted to the bounce
and giving in
to motion’s victory over imbalance.

I hear Ian Brown
of the Stone Roses sing:

“see land begin to clear
free from the filth and scum”

So cursed with unusually good
vestibular function,
I remember vomiting
on a Middletown cop’s boot.

That time had nothing to do
with my inner ear.
That time has everything to do
with having to declare I'm one too.

I remember falling a little bit
for the best friend
of my man’s younger brother
(those damn Minnesota boys).

My oldest sister got to have the crushes first.
I got her hand-me-downs.

The friend dares the brother
to swipe a pair of his ma’s pantyhose
to use as a net for catching crayfish
in Minnehaha Creek.

A cataract, a clinker,
a list of reminders begins:

charcoal pills and razors
hair elastics and Venetian blinds
cleaner and Muddy
Waters menus and cocktail napkins

two rolls of KT tape
and two travel size bottles
of nonalcoholic mouthwash
just in case

That clinker in the right eye
was in the left last night.

I know the woman
who discovers a hole in the deck
of the Osceola Bridge while on a canoe trip
down the Saint Croix with her pilot husband.

That is her husband who is a pilot,
not a trial husband
who might get canceled
after one season.

I remember all the days I wasted
waiting for my life to spill forth.

“she’ll carry on through it all
she's a waterfall”

sometimes I believe
I am writing
one long-ass poem
to uncoil slowly
like a Jesus Christ
lizard tail
ready to brush
your hollow cheek
before the appendage
breaks off

I will grow a new one
I don't have to grow a new one
life without a tail
is a lonely walk
across water

I consider the flashy metallic elytra
on a beetle that gets tangled in my hair
how I don't realize
it has hitched a ride
till I am inside the hotel lobby
how guilt motivates me
to scoop it onto a map
of the central business district
to return it to the great outdoor
concrete wilderness

I consider
the possibility
rows and rows of Indiana corn
is the best line
I will ever write

how 44 years
is a long time
to wait to see
my best friend
from elementary school again
consider writing a poem
called third child
how we hold onto
the position
even when baby brothers are born

how I jones
for words
that work hard
on paper
inside books

how I don't identify with Baby Boomers
who taught me new math
and old style mechanical drawing
or Gen Xers
raised on MTV and Nintendo
how I belong to whatever cohort
my sisters belong to
how I'm always tagging along
with mud on my face
and sand in my shoes

I consider how exhilarating
to swear freely inside a water tank
turned mecca for sonic arts
how I will enter through a proper door
not a drainage hole
hell damn it all
I will make this shit
swell awash with the sound
of water that hasn't powered
a locomotive in a hundred years

consider how
that hummingbird isn't dead
just startled
to find itself
flat on its back

sometimes I believe being born
on a Sunday evening in late fall
means I will always worship
the darkness that blots out
civil twilight's embers

I don't own land
I am slang
I must keep moving
I am an obligate ram breather
I am slang

An architect doodles
on a blank matchbook cover.

The tiniest
skyscraper stands tall

inside a taller version
of itself. If

my mother kept
reproducing daughters

we could be
the Land O' Lakes butter girls,

or Russian nesting dolls.
We're no one's little matrons.

The album cover art
to Pink Floyd's Ummagumma

triggers flashbacks of 1969—
the year I learn to dance

to "Sugar, Sugar"

and two guys in identical suits walk
(with all of their reflections

of their former selves)
on the surface of the moon.

We watch it on TV
in our grandparents' basement

in Westwood. Or,
is it the great room

in their beach cottage
on the Vineyard?

It's her word against hers against mine
against the higher pitched voices

we used inside and outside
to sling our favorite slang at one another.

The Droste nurse offers you hot cocoa
to comfort a broken heart,

while a smaller one offers
a smaller you a smaller cup

and so on
till Escher tells everyone

to stop.
He never does.

A damselfly nymph
may resort to cannibalism.

I’m going to keep writing
about the Airport Road
till I get it right.

Till the radio plays
the exact song I need
to remember the smell

of the pines
in the breeze
as the wood panel station wagon

speeds along. Windows rolled down.
My mother and her lead foot.
I come from a family of lead feet.

While they put the pedal
to the metal, I press my foot firmly
on an imaginary brake

till it bangs against
the back seat floorboard,
till I give up. Resume

watching the world go by.
Always humming something,
this time it’s

“scoot down the road
what’s my number
I wonder how your engines feel”

Not the song
but a good one
to begin with.

In reality, you
were probably too young
to hitchhike

the last time
we pick up my father
from the tiny airport

in a clearing
in the woods.

If I am 9,
you are 13.
Too young.

Then I read maps
will need to be redrawn.

An iceberg the size of Delaware
has broken off the Antarctic Peninsula.

The age of hitchhikers
seems so insignificant

compared to the future
of seacoasts everywhere.

Think of Billingsgate Shoal
used to be Island.

A weather app
says it’s raining.
That’s not what I see
or feel on my skin.

Another app
tells me to boomerang
everything in view
and lean into the vertigo.

A shifted angle doesn’t help
this far off the horizon.

I am that line
you cross
when you expect
a different descent.

I fall
in the gap between
the first 1 WTC
and the next.

I don’t know
how to mind it at all.

I don’t have the right
to call myself a survivor.
I descend from one—
now dead from other causes.

I keep forgetting to include the kiss
fear of forgetting cannot be cured
with remembering

I hear a voice on the plane intercom
mumble something
no one else hears

I can’t make out what the artist
who creates mummy sculptures from shrink wrap
says about their souls

dead fathers are as proud
of their daughters
as when they were alive

scratch that
no one knows
what a mummy desires most

the one I dream about last night
is not the one I touch with my lips and thighs
26 years ago

he is the one who shares a chicken dance
with the one I touch
that second night in a backstage trailer

that doubles
as a green room
no green in sight

not even under the table
with tour rider leftovers
spilling forth

his brother dies 22 years ago
from a drug overdose
in the dead of a deadly cold Minnesota winter

he used to play cards
with my two closest buddies then—
both dead now too

he used to call me his Amybody
the brother that is
not the one I dream about last night

doesn’t call me anything
that time he and the lead singer
drop their jeans to their ankles

just cackles
a signature cackle
you know the one

I keep forgetting
whether I forgot to take my pills
so I take another

am I an amnesiac
or an addict
or simply an imposter in a silver dress

to the tabula rasa man I say
clean your own slate
clap your own erasers

I’m busy
pretending I haven’t
considered you naked

I remember that Indian girl in first grade
her father is missing some fingers
they say he lost them in the spokes of a bicycle wheel

a bike turned
upside down
but that makes no sense

a 27-year-old man tells me
about riding the Coney Island Cyclone
how he would take greater risks

when he was a kid
I think
you are a kid

you are the age I was
when I rip my life to shreds
just to get a better look

at the lakes from plane view
eventually falling
into one of them

I do not drown
I do die
I do not drown

you mention the beauty
of Leonard Cohen’s song
you want it darker

you look directly at me
when you say this
yes go darker

and I say
that voice
I am always saying

that voice

the airplane bathroom
is held together with magic blue
masking tape

you warn me
not to get attached
not to stick to one for long

we torture ourselves
with the choices
we don’t make

we torture ourselves
by returning to the scene
of some stolen love

you know the ritual
we are both trying to recover from
an incense hangover that has no cure

when I tell you I have accomplished
my two lifetime goals by age 27
you tell me

don’t just run a marathon win one
don’t just publish a book publish a novel

our story begins toward the end
of the third act
has nowhere to go after

the is it mine question
I want to listen
to songs that make me feel

like I’m falling
off the edge of the earth
into an algae bloom infested pool