I’ll be walking under the radar,
under street lights, not
off the grid.

I’ll be unlicensed, never
trafficking in titles
with or without wheels.

I’ll be posting signs:
“The ocean is not for sale”
in that forever city girl way.

I’ll be desperately seeking ginger
essence with just the right amount
of zing and spice.

The perfectly steeped
blue bottled
rose water.

I’ll be reading labels out loud:
“You know how to use it—
massage liberally into skin.”

I’ll be remembering
how to swim
is like riding a bicycle

from the muddy pedestrian trail
beneath the birches. I’ll be
more climber than swinger

if I start practicing again.
If the trees can forgive me.

What are they whispering about me
into the canopy air? Warning
their neighbors to beware

through their hidden underground
fungal wood wide web?
The secret’s out.

I’ll be coming in peace,
limbs respectfully bent downward,
my feet planted firmly in the duff.

I’ll be back.

The paper dolls
you assembled, then hid
so well. The accordion
bus before the band

destroyed it.
The skeleton you
read about, never
found. The vestibule

car where I waited for you
to return. The last words
you might have uttered—
with only the slightest

hint of fresh ginger
on your tongue.

If our secrets keep us
sick, this fear
of naming it,
of forgetting
to name it,
this willow wicker
bend in the road—
it can all be
so unforgiving.

I used to have three
rocking chairs.
Now I have one—

a sturdy wine-colored wicker
affair designed for a wraparound
porch I never had.

I began gathering them
back in New Haven,
desperate to be

comforted. To rock away
silent demons. To roll over
the haunting curl of waves.

There used to be three
wooden swings behind the cottage
marking the spot where the Beach Road

Extension fades into a dead end.
Our grandfather made one for each
of us girls. Long before there was a boy.

Each time I return
to the island
and trespass down

that private dirt drive
(really more sand than dirt),
I’m too afraid to look.

What if one of them is missing?
All or nothing, no matter what.

No Fates. No Grays.
We were not the daughters
of Phorcys + Ceto,

or Zeus + Themis,
or Nyx all by herself.
Well, then again, maybe Nyx.

This itch
to find a new island.
To explore.

That unintentional crease
in the sleeve.

This dust
on the needle as it loses meaning
without skipping a beat,

without a turntable
to save you.

That flip
of the hair
tossed off so easily.

This trigger false comfort—
the detoxification.

That song played
on repeat
before the bomb explodes.

This time,
the answers cannot be found

upside down
in the back of the book.
That twitch most of all

because, sometimes, you just want
to dance.

She’s entered the throw
the pen across the room
tantrum era. And she misses

the way ink used to flow
(without interruption)
to greet her

(mistaken) love for you.
How nothing would impede
her from rushing headlong,

no, heartlong,
into some ill-timed, ill-advised
irrepressible infatuation

never built to last.
And the sympathetic kind
wouldn’t dry up.

She’s not done
telling Portland brownstone quarry
stories. The cliff jumping,
never brave enough to dive
or rappel her way down.

She’s not done
cladding vestibules in terra-cotta
moss tile. The abandoned
beautility shed
is in danger

of losing its essence.
Someone has made a mess
of her facade
trying to remove the “You’re beautiful”
tattoo. She’s not done

scratching your initials
gently into the soft wood
of so many park benches—whispers
to calm night’s
untranslatable terrors.

She’s not done
romanticizing the stoop.
Beneath the pavement, it is
so much like a beach.
She’s not done

baking clay, laying bricks.
She’s not done
asking the brick
what it wants.
She’s entered the room

without any weapons left
in her hands, except
an old postcard.
In cramped, barely legible
handwriting, it reads:

From one island
to another, I confess
you can see Cuttyhunk,
but not Uncatena, from here.
I know we’re not done yet.

She writes out the number: Two.
No question, it won’t add up.
How we’re all dying. Getting closer
to it each day. How the anxiety of being

caught in the dark
cellar—door closed, maybe locked,
shades secure on the bridge
of the nose—hurts less than burning

under the sun. Our feathers singed
and unhinged. Our wings bared
and useless as clews
still affixed to a pair of tree trunks

after the deep sag has snapped
to wipe the smile off the hammock.

Now a heap of hemp in the dirt.
The shortest distance between two points
is a straight line no one can walk
forever, or at all. If only we didn’t live

on this slightly squished
and bulging sphere.
Another sign of the beauty
of imperfection all around us.

Water must be one
of the categories. Full

stop. Snow melt drains
into street pot holes +

sidewalk dips + puckers
to form a chain, no

a maze, of tiny bodies
of water, temporarily elevating the land

of 10,000 lakes tally
to a new high.

Today’s soggy scene becomes
tomorrow’s slate lullaby.

Unmasked ghosts materialize
in the morning mud

to warn of highway dangers.
Maws dripping with silt +

slurs will have their moment.

You think you can shed your skin
like some kind of snake

to escape into the next
you. Some kind of last-century lover,

she’s already onto that one too.
Always island hopping,

she wanders off in both directions
(in search of hidden passages +

bridges) the way she promised
she wouldn’t.

And she puts her paws
on your shoulders

when she comes to.
This is no hollow meandering.

This is your tomorrow’s murmur.
All that luscious black hair

gets entangled with submerged tree roots when she swims in the dark—

so desperate to be entertained
by her own terror.

She fumbles through
a decade making sculptures
from leftover cardboard cores
(exposed when the toilet paper rolls
run out) with empty flax seed bags
tucked inside them.

Sometimes ground. Sometimes whole.
Sometimes the seeds themselves
become part of the piece.

Predating pandemic solitude,
sunshine would filter through
half open venetian blinds.
She would configure and reconfigure
her found materials
into premonitions

about what the day outside might hold.
Rarely repeating the form
or ink she used to write the words

that would become the glue
to hold it all together.
Always invisible—
mostly sympathetic. Messages
only oak galls can whisper.
Only a little blue vitriol can decode.

And the tallest trees
in urban pocket parks
would bend and moan.

Every poem ever written
is a form
of steganography.

I’ve written of lovers
in the past. Lovers

who were just passing through.
Those who passed on

their wisdom and symptoms.
Some passed on seconds.

Others were merely looking
for a mountain pass to traverse—

any kind of defile would do.
And then there were the ones

who hoped to pass the ultimate test.
The ones making passes

at anyone in sunglasses.
Yet others hoping to pass

as dead ringers for the heroes
I left behind the hotel

on the bluff overlooking the sound.
And lovers who have simply passed.