It’s come to this:
She’s reciting poetry aloud
while standing fully clothed
in a clawfoot tub.

It’s come to this:
He’s whispering answers
to unanswerable questions
while lying naked in a nearby grotto.

It’s come to this:
The ball of flax twine slips
from the kite’s talon, lands
on a bluff, bounces, then rolls

over the edge into more thinning air.

It’s come to this:
She doesn’t need to dry off. Instead,
she loosens one screw, and the entire
bicycle seat comes apart. She can’t forgive

herself for such clumsy disassembly.

It’s come to this:
He remembers barnacles,
quickly grabs jeans and a jacket,
packs up his collection of lightning

flashes, heads to the pier.

It’s come to this:
She ties a string skirt around her hips,
reaches across a canyon
for an apple slice, knocks over

a wobbly shale palisade in the process.

It’s come to this:
Wind blows traces of salt and burning
dune grass across the sound
to the only place where they might meet

if it doesn’t crumble first.

the self tucked beneath the broken
cellar door. A message
to all of us who would sculpt
drunken angels from stale snow.
Those of us who would wear ourselves
out on sleeves cut from subway maps,
sewn together crooked of course.
Hand me another bottle
of you before regret
covers my body head to toe.

I live in this universe instead.
It’s riddled with inner islands
floating inside ships
overflowing with irony.
I wait waist high in reservoir guilt.
I weigh recursive lies in motion
against static stick figures
spilling drinks mixed in reliquaries.
Kisses I risked giving in girlhood
collide with this single twisted limb image,

which survives inside itself.

This failed identity.
This littoral outside.
This lifted city.
This rising upside.
This solid illusion.
This storied inside.

Another forgotten parallel world
where we rocked ourselves to sleep
under the waves and trees.

I’ll try to go it alone.
I put The Waves back on the shelf.

I squint to flatten my perspective,
so it appears

you are still standing beside me
on a secret sandbar. We all know the truth.

1,200 miles + more than half a lifetime
separate our bodies.

You always were an island,
no matter how many bridges got built

to attempt to fasten you
to the rest of us.

I’m no island, no bridge,
no wrack line, no bluff, no cape.

Not even a spit or some patch
of tidal flats.

I’m the dinghy

that gets dragged off the beach
into cold water during emergencies.

I’m still learning not to interfere—
to leave the oars behind.

when she will no longer remember why
she came here

when the saddle tilted too much
the wrong way

when she will recall how they were holding hands under the table

when only the right ulnar nerve
has become entrapped

when the island will be covered
in snow

when the left hand has worked so hard
for so long without complaint

when the redheaded beauty will deliver
the scent of rosewater to her again

when the giraffe has batted
its long lashes one more time in the alley

when she will no longer remember why
she hurt herself so viciously

when a loud “no” was necessary + not
always enough

when a full-throated “yes”
will begin to happen naturally

when she used to sit on an open window
sill + gaze at the Bronx street below

when she will turn 59 next
when Virginia didn’t turn 60

when she first discovered
she loves the minor key

when his fingers will do
the remembering

when she lost the callous
on her left middle one

when she will lose her voice forever
when she loved his best

when her love affair
with the Mississippi River began

when will she take the last walk
alongside it

when the ocean was beginning
to die

when where will be
the waves

when she has no more
when’s to give

then it will be time to stop
running away from home

—————————————————————

Note: The title comes from a soliloquy by the character Rhoda in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves.

becomes the yolk
trapped inside the yes
of the no longer young
becomes the first yawl
wrecked without a ship this year

when the yawn
of the snow-covered yard
becomes an old lover’s yen
to become the only yowl
true desire might yield

when the yarn
tangled inside the yawp
becomes unreliable as a distant yerk
or another memory of you
becomes what is left to yearn

I used to write letters
to everyone I wanted to see
me. Now I write poems—these missives
to nobody save those who would live
in the ruined unknowing
of a city’s underground ocean.

——————————————————

Note: The title comes from a line in Emily Dickinson’s poem “This Is My Letter to the World”

Kiss rhymes with what I hear
when I close my eyes
on the coldest of Minnesota
January nights.

Desperate for a palate cleanser
to remove the ultimately bitter taste
left in my mouth from slipping
too deeply into a euphoric recall coma,

I make a pact with myself.
I’m going to play his music
all day long.
His—not his, or his, or his, or.

Into those wee hours I used to rule
in little black dresses and torn
fishnet tights and voracious vixen
lipstick (remember lipstick?).

Into those wee hours
where I rarely go now,
it’s not all dancing in your sleep.
Another train rattles us awake.

This incurable condition.
Limbs can be so confusing—
I should know.
I’m in good hands today.

———————————————————

Note: The title comes from a line in Verbena’s song “Song That Ended Your Career,” written by A.A. Bondy

I will remember
I did do
I do love

I will be remembering
I was doing
I am loving

I will have remembered
I had done
I have loved

I will have been remembering
I had been doing
I have been loving

So yes
I do
remember love

She knows this dock—
each splinter, barnacle,
hurricane-spared stilt.

It is not a plank. It’s where she walks.
She knows how to dive,
has been doing it for years.

No easing into the wash,
she plunges in and is used to it
before others awake.

This is underworld—closets, caves, shelves,
trenches, forests, hydromedusa, brittle
stars, Painlevé’s camera.

This is where she should live—
she who is a sponge
is a sponge is a sponge.

She will never work a room
on dry land, works the ocean floor
with the precision of a jelly bloom.

To become exposed to air,
the rising sun. It is her death
to appear before all of us.

Metal crushes metal on a distant street, emergency
sirens approach
closer, closer. A muffled distortion underwater.

Leave her enough sea room.
She would rather synchronize her own sculls
outside a tank

than be confounded by a mirage of closing night roses
she can’t reach without a body.

She rides a 32-year-old bike
through the snow without crashing.
Does not get the wind

knocked out of her.
No gulping + gasping for breath
in the middle of Central Park

rush hour traffic. There’s no such
thing as Central Park rush hour
traffic these days. No such thing

as people + vehicles coming + going
in the tight confines of the alley
behind her apartment building.

It’s a lie.
It happens
all day + night.

Dumpster divers, garbage collectors, smokers, Lyft + Uber drivers,
candlestick makers + her.

It’s a lie—
those tire tracks
in the snow.

Her duende + guardian angel
have been traveling abroad so long
she can’t decipher fiction

from nonfiction, from the beautiful
friction between. She can’t remember
how to decode the darkness.

A 21-speed all-terrain Trek model
for the urban commuter
collects dust in the basement.

She has no idea
where she put the key
to that Kryptonite U-lock.

She really only knows how to run.
Cannot keep pace with her younger self,
who lately taunts + baits her

to take roads only her duende
(or is it her guardian angel?)
knows how to traverse.

She wears a newfound patience
as a waterproof poncho
against the elements.

Her younger self would have cut it
into pieces like some useless bedsheet
to twist into headbands

to trap the sweat of unexamined fear.
A rooftop dance party is another
euphoric recall episode

to record before it’s too late.
If she wrote a memoir,
would anyone read it?

Damn you, duende + guardian angel.
Get home soon. These elbows
have rested on this sill too long.