I see you are wearing
your polka dot dress tonight.
I’m wearing mine too.

See.

Sometimes I forget to zip
up all the way.
Does that happen to you too?

I see you enjoy the dirty,
the dilapidated, the peeled.
Me too. Me too.

Did you suck your thumb
as a child? I never stopped.
And now I’m dead.

Correction. My creator that is.
I am very much a living work of art,
nearly 50 years old.

I see you know how
old buildings speak
while camouflaging what disturbs

us deep inside. When I cover
my mouth with my fingers like this,
everyone thinks I’m ashamed.

You and I know better.
How smiles and frowns begin
the same way. Lips bow up and down

veiled or not.
I am a cheetah.
Are you one too?

I will be a leopard
tomorrow. How about you?
They call us spotted

hyenas. You and I
know better—the laughter
the hand conceals.

As you wait for floating
islands to salvage the little lake
sandwiched between an interstate
and a parkway. As you wait

for the day
to mature enough to collect

larch cones in the north garden
before it snows. As you wait
for salt
from the closest marsh

to thicken. As you wait to see
the occasional island

lose its independence
again. And for the coffee
to kick in and lead you
to the secret drawbridge

covering the breach
till next time. As you wait

for the lighthouse keeper
to wave back. The startling
sound of a shoal beneath.
As you wait to land

in the fog
and for us to begin.

All this time, you thought I was someone
else. Precious cargo and
a grove of tamarack trees nowhere
near where you run under the overpass.

This migraine, those stories, your character
wiped clean. The tension in those clenched-jaw
details once visible on the pavement.
This is no protest—

this ghost of a voice
in you trickles out. You think you see
the moon again before dawn.
Now that we’ve been reacquainted,

you will meet your own
handwriting next and skip every other
line to become the fragmented fragrance
I always dreamed you could be.

When someone covers Bowie’s “Heroes,”
and you see the road not taken,
and the horizon weaves its jagged way
behind a row of broken empty bottles, and,

oh, I know
I am so vain, and
we’re all just pushing each other
away, and that’s it.

Because no one questions why
she runs circles around a parking lot

to get another glimpse
of the albino squirrel.

Because a mysterious catlike creature
with a raccoon tail darts between cars

on a moving freight train, flies
across the trail into the woods.

And with the Washington Monument
in the distance, she asks a stranger:

How worried should we be?

And the dead bee
on the windowsill.

Because she can’t remember
whose father burned hedges

with a torch that was more
flashlight, less spark.

Because we wobbled, and they
were waiting for us. And some other

hero flies so high into the cotton
ball clouds without wings

to weigh him down. Because she searches
for a loophole in the pergola

where logic has been flattened

into nitro cold brew cans
waiting to be recycled.

And his arrival time has changed.
Because he’s due to invade

her mind in three hours—not two.
And reshaping brows of mountains

into 45-degree angles
does not equal the distance

traveled to reach the light
the night before he died.

Because it’s not what she thought
it would look like. Because a man

tells his lover he’s going
to take more pictures. Because

their eyes were lit from within.
And all the saints were wearing

the same international orange robes
with black silk sashes. And

it’s almost as if the morning could
calm phantom desire.

And because she says she belongs
to it.

When she maps a route through
the labyrinth with a wand
she found buried in the dirt

beneath a copse of brilliant
yellow tamarack trees.

When it’s all so risky:
the robot that drags
the river that floods

then dries up that comes
before down that drink

before anyone sees
that a telescope is not
going to bring the island

back to her now
that everyone wants to leave

this wrecked domain, rock
smashing through
its own orbit.

When it’s loyalty,
or fear, that keeps her

standing inside this cube
with glass hatches. She asks
if she can bring

her guitar to comfort
the prairie. When silence answers

in the way only silence can.

She frees herself
of the final memory,

gets in the car, drives off.
When no one stops her—
the hatch-lined sketch tucked

inside the island’s chalk outline
least of all. She’s gonna give

the real ones away.
When we all believed
California was an island.

What was the orca thinking
when she swallowed
all those full-grown sea
otters whole? In the final

moments of her life—needle
sharp claws piercing the throat.
The circularity of it all.
Some day, the trapezoid will conquer

estuaries. Rivers will reveal
themselves to be the true ouroboros
as they devour falls,
concrete, bedrock, banks

whole. And I’ll be balancing
on the floating boardwalk.
Failing to skip stones,
I’ll be making lists instead.

Things that rock:

One hundred boats
during last night’s storm.

The wooden horse with chipped
white paint peeling off. Bare feet

on sand. Buoys beyond the harbor.
The chairs on your father’s porch.

A plane flying over the mountain.
The coffee-stirring

Steinway Tower on West 57th Street.
The foreshocks, mainshocks,

aftershocks, everything
between. Every last boy I was

infatuated with. The getting over
each one. From there, I will list

to the rhythm of the quaking bog
beneath my feet.

A fire anniversary singes
early fall before
a cool rain drenches Friday the

13th. She always dreamed
she would meet
a singer with The

for a middle name. This
and so many other
lies have seeped

into the Devil’s Backbone
over the decades. Plied
with drink, a long ridge,

a flooded buffalo
trail, a spring-fed
pond, a hidden creek,

a relocated waterfall,
a collection of ghost islands,
and that story of how

no one holds the key
to the boiler room.
The action evaporated

with those spontaneously
ignited dances. And your definition
of this is no life

does not register with her

or her
band of solitudes.
She folds

clean clothes
and blankets
each week

no matter
how sad
you get.

Her grandmother understood
the ocean more

than she ever would,
no matter how often she returned

to the island. She kept

an hourglass on a table
beside the window

overlooking the shrinking
beach. The front door

faced the water.
The great room

held the ghost
of a cathedral ceiling

from a time before
her grandfather had the atrium filled

with a dormitory
for the three girls.

As a child, she wondered
how her grandmother got the sand

(or was it powdered marble)
inside those oblong glass bulbs.

She never wondered
about the stern-looking tin angel

that stood in the bookcase
on the east wall. Its story

did not concern her
the way those seashell mornings

would startle her awake.
She wanted to pause

those tiny granules
mid-flow. How exactly

did the nearby islands
arise from remnants

of a terminal moraine?
She had no idea how

obsessed she would become
with Uncatena:

the island + the ferry.
A name she could not shake

or trace to its origin.
She merely wanted the hourglass

to reveal the mysteries
trapped within Timmy Point Shoal.

Wild turkeys return
to the hillside trail, while
I run forward—

ruining

this dawn
with my legs
for oars.

Dew + insects.