Get this:
Chloe still likes Olivia
Chloe loves Olivia.
Chloe proposed to Olivia
right there
in the laboratory.
Chloe and Olivia
are getting married.
Everyone’s invited.
Come back, come back,
Virginia, just for this one day.
Overnight Poems
Taint
She dances on
the pelvic floor
of her younger self.
It’s not disrespect.
Or it is. It hurts
to remember so much.
The body knows.
It’s not always enough.
She hasn’t relaxed
in a hammock
in 20 years. An expandable
weave. Wouldn’t know
how to begin.
Hers is
a gravity celebrating
Martha Graham
denunciation of
sentimental leaps.
No Apology
Maybe I don’t want to wait
for you to resurface.
One dive off
a broken pier
is enough
warning. Murky water
won’t tell on you
the way she did. She didn’t
hold back—mirrors,
selfies, Instagram, cruel
works. I don’t want to
wait. Won’t say a word.
This instrumental
will be
the lost anchor.
Cycloid
Piano is levitas;
Kahn is gravitas.
We all play roulette
sometimes without knowing it. Feudal
play is
a chain mail wall
that responds
to touch. The curve
traced by a point
on the rim
of a wheel
as it rolls along
a straight line
without slipping. Slipping
is not required. When
does a slip become
a relapse? You are the most
imperfect auditorium
absorbing and reflecting
the sound of my mind
as it hovers over deep sleep.
In the left margin,
fish scales climb
or descend.
When you write
yourself out
of the story, it becomes futile
to try to sneak back in. The acoustics
in the church
where we held my father’s funeral
captured too much
bounce and echo. No one
understood a word
we were saying. Is
an omniscient narrator
a better bouncer
than an intrusive one?
Who is more reliable?
What about the polyphonic?
I remember
writing the Ecstatic
Uptown Chronicles
in fragments with you
over drinks (and drugs)
one winter. The first
one. I was lost. I was found.
I was a wretch—so were you.
It was
exquisite—
that corpse
of a song
we couldn’t resuscitate.
Pulling glass
from his skull,
he stands
a chance
of relocating
his compass
without
a GPS.
I am
so invisible
I am
free to
If voices are hereditary,
I sing like
the dead.
The first
bridge I fell
in love with
was over
troubled water.
No more art
in the schools,
we make it here
from glitter and bat shit. Crazy
how guano
fertilizes the most
unlikely plots.
A chicken shits
on a construction paper
bingo board. You pin it
to the wall
next to the velvet
painting of a cowboy
and call it
No time to fix
errant capitalization.
I remember
first encountering
Frank Lloyd Wright
while dancing
on that bridge
over troubled water.
Architects may come
architects may
All the news
I need
is in the weather
report that is
fit to print. I am
the only living boy
in New York. I miss both—
the boy and the City.
She has one eye
looking due east,
the other northwest.
She says she can
sew him back together
if you want. Do you
want? We all want
to go
where there’s
no sound
some nights,
don’t we?
Thyrsus Snapped
Deep beneath rhythm’s
crust, a bubble of sound
bursts open. A slow seep
to the surface then a widening
slick spreads across the lake.
Without a bridge,
the song finds its own
shape—becomes
its own Helicon mystery.
A New Layer
Discovered in Earth’s mantle. What
would it take to leave
the troposphere
for the stratosphere
for the mesosphere? All the way
to the thermosphere. What
about the pauses between? What
do I really know
about my own epidermis,
dermis, hypodermis? What
if I discovered a hidden layer
in there? Would you come
looking for me there?
Open or Closed
Who will build
the hotel to house all
the souvenir
heroes stacked
against that cellar
door? That perfectly
framed cellar door. One more
time, and I could go
to heaven
where I wouldn’t care
about that pile
of bones and springs and fascia and tentacles
and fins and feet and hair and eyes.
The ones staring
past mine.
Interrupters
Her biannual dream
of him gets cut short
by the cat’s early morning
demands. In it, a hotel
room filled with lost
friends bleeds over
a highway bike ride
she would never take
awake. A memory
of drinking vodka
martinis in a tree
under a warm Connecticut
night sky fades into forgetting
the last time she saw
his face: he’s married / everyone’s
married / generalizations
every one of them / a drive
back to New York City after
a Northampton, Mass., wedding /
a carload of drunken
college students at a drive-in
movie theater / a run
by the Long Lane School
( years before the suicide)
at midnight / making love
with a cast
on her foot in a Bronx studio /
those step streets come into play
again / he smoked, she didn’t,
he quit, she started, she quit, the air
they breathe no longer
shared / it’s no longer
early / time
to feed the cat
The Offing
Graffiti in the fresh
snow concealing a stone
wall. A window
that opens both ways—
from the top and
from the bottom.
The squirrel electrocuted
by a power line.
The lights that go out
temporarily. A freshly lit
match and a beeswax candle.
The ever so slightly
sweet honey scent
of your sweat
that lingers
after you’ve left the cabin.
Hermit Crab
The first adaptive
reusers before
it became trendy
to convert a shoe
box into,
well, anything
besides a shoe
box. A covered bridge
into an amphitheater
for Amish punk gigs. A Dairy
Queen into a library
that houses reels
of documentary films
and mysterious microfiche. Summer
mansion into convent into
venue for flying
garters and bouquets.
Do they still do that?
No vacancy
chain. Everyone’s hoteling
it now. Or, hot desking
without reservation.
Anything to protect the soft abdomen
from invaders.
Night & Day Poems of Amy Nash 