Slip on ice but don’t fall
down. Seventeen more
days. We want a preview.
If I were a train,
I’d be local
and mostly underground
till I’m not. Sub or el—either way
I’d move people more
than I could ever move you
or me into tomorrow’s
shades of the unstratified.
Why can’t I accept
your invitation—to what
would it be to cause this collapse
of self-awareness. Not a rhetorical question
but one for the digital social etiquette
manual not written
down. Love between bytes
hasn’t caught on. Or, I haven’t caught
it. Inoculation is how I live now. And these invites
seldom require leaving this post
where I navigate traffic
inside a grain of sand.
“Whose flame/Is the imprisoned lightning.”
—Emma Lazarus, from “The New Colossus”
In a slow return to daylight after hours, she winks
at March and flirts
with her own promises to wake up
a tiny piece
of dirt. Hers is an impassioned lightning
that could strike
even now—before spring.
* also from Emma Lazarus’ “The New Colossus.”
Seven dollars still in her pocket
as she rounds the skyway connector
without a detour. No purchase.
necessary—she’s already won
a trip to freedom.
At least an overnighter
while window sills remain banked
with snow here for another seven (or so).
In an era when buildings opened
with zippers, she fastens her life together
with safety pins. Then she hears them drop
one by one on dried mud. Inside
gets entangled in the outside—a blur
with or without corrective lenses. Pricked fingers,
the aromatics of March come next.
. . . do I count them
before or after
this verbal thievery? If I live
in the past, may as well revel
in this day come nightfall.
Twenty years is a long time to be
entranced by a voice. The voice. It stops
my soul from deflating
under self-reflexive pressure. The voice
that fills a dark room as if
it’s been doing it
since long before I was born. This is
the voice that invites me
to stop leaving out
the moment we’re in now. Who knew.
The first time I could have thought
I’d died and gone to heaven, I didn’t.
Only years later would I see
how one night of live music inside Toad’s
Place would be all I ever needed—
one almost lethal obsession kicking
in, another stubbornly tame one sparked
and filed away in a Midwestern vault
for safe keeping. Do not remove for more
than a decade (and a half). The first time
I did think I’d died and gone
there, I took a wrong turn
onto a riverboat and got trapped tracing
a wake aft. To cross it without spilling
into myself has become a new preoccupation
about to break the surface. Ready
as I’ll never be and all other stolen
turns of phrase twisted inside out.
Scams in layered designer
clothes dance under
runways where beautiful
naïves hollow out thought
before all of us
left. Where the real
spectator sits huddled
is old/new media free.
To become retro
for the third time, to hear
laughter cloud the air
from a different direction—more west
than east, south than north—to lose
track of the full moon
tally is to be in medias
res. Is to be on
the verge
of reconciliation: talk
with listen, sleep with walk, trust with
survive, survive with prevail.
So concerned with giving
credit where laws say
it’s due, she forgets what she intended
to steal—loses
the pearl in its muck.
Night & Day Poems of Amy Nash 