Slush wins
over black ice
or snow or hail or mist
or lust for numbers that don’t line
the clouds.

She finds herself
running along the wrong side
of the fence.

A seemingly endless
chain-link barrier
keeps her in the muck

and mire
and dog shit—
and make no mistake

this is
a wall.

When your worst nightmare
comes true and your nasty woman shouts
boomerang back to your ears
as muzzled ghost moans.

When flashbacks
to a highschool date rape
before date rape existed
and a stranger on a bicycle
who sexually molested you in the middle
of the sacred act of running
wreck the few moments of sleep
you try to catch.

When you feel yourself losing
the battle to avoid placing blame
and your city girl soul wants
to [#%$&#%#]
the spirit of [%#$&#%]

When you wonder if the pendulum
really will swing back again,
and if it does, how many otherized
victims will be bludgeoned
in the wake of its arc.

When the date November 9, 2016,
scrolls across the screen
and can only be read upside down
and it gives you vertigo to try.

When, then, now
you hope for a miracle—
to keep your mind open wide,
your heart open wider.

“Like a bird on a wire
Like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried in my way to be free.”
—Leonard Cohen, “Bird on a Wire”

A poet
loves the
songwriter. A
songwriter doesn’t
love the
poet back.

Her speaking voice carries
loudly through half-bare branches
of trees that won’t give it all up yet.

His handwriting
is only
half legible.
The words
slant to
the left

before reaching a perfectly
perpendicular rhythm as the stone wall
blocks the light.

No box
of mirrors
will rescue
the colors
lost inside
his song.

She doesn’t want to trap him
into seeing her. He saw her
once but got drunk

a decade later. Now
the poem needs a door
to lean against.

It’s the singer who discovers
the gap they have tried
so hard to conceal.

To hide in a hollow,
holler, or rabbit hole

To fear
the widening horizon

To admit to being
a little bit mad without shame

To believe in the inverted
negative view more

To speak slowly
with an ice-blue-eyed stare

To crave the texture of a black pebble
wall to lean against

and a nubbed rouge rug
beneath bare feet

To open a book
without pictures or conversations

To love the promise
and terror of the blank page

To be too early to everything
and too late to fix it

To go on like this
ad infinitum

is to lap herself
without apology or regret

The week of future tense
will gain momentum midway
through longer journeys
along trails with spurs.

It will bring stronger winds
and trees shedding
their warmer colors.
There will be night sweats.

She will acknowledge
the colder rain outside
with a cool gray voice inside.
She will use her words

to promote a stranger’s
single-line diagram
as the secret map
that will guide us to exit

this broken rhythm—
vowells to be discarded
along the breakdown lane.

It started
as a barely audible rumble.
Slowly it grew
till a voice projected
through a megaphone
hollered in the darkness:

Black and white
were shades of gray first.
Tin tile ceilings
came before aluminum siding.
64 was a perfect cube
before it got waxed.

How the Bee Gees stole
that intro scratch
from Jimi Hendrix.

How she loved
to wear sunglasses
in the rain.

How the words
came last
if they came at all.

How he walked the same
sidewalk she did,
and they never met.

How the Manhattan skyscraper
bedrock myth
got debunked by

the sky (and the depth of developers’ pockets)
not the ground below
was the limit.

How rock paper scissors
spread beyond Asia
only a hundred years ago.

How the orange lizard
beat the blue, blue beat yellow,
yellow beat orange.

Sometimes the scratch
was just a scratch.

And the cue ball
was a milky globe

that lost its way
inside a dark pocket
without a GPS signal.

on this warm October afternoon
the moist air smells more
like spring dirt rising
than parched death falling

this is the last
day of her week
of writing
about the present tense

tomorrow she returns
to her preoccupation
with yesterday

she hears Hendrix
drag Dylan’s
like a rolling stone
through Mississippi blues mud

in the background
purple haze
comes before
purple rain

she knows about this chronology
more than the flames
that burn up another guitar
shaped leaf on the sidewalk

the threat of another storm
shrinks by the minute
as the waxy taste
of candy corn

corrupts her view
of high rises
on the other side
of the hill in the park

she shreds light
with her teeth
to form the words

don’t be late

reaching the next
island that wrecks
the horizon
with its geologically active grin

“With used furniture he makes a tree.”
—Anne Sexton (from “The Black Art”)

She wants to carry a bundle
of twigs into the wood
where she will do her best
to get lost.

Where she will turn
benches into trees,
trees into musical chairs
below the thrush’s found song.