I was still looking for the horizon
inside a tunnel beneath a bay
a skipping stone’s distance
from an island I once knew.

+/- then a monster container
ship gets stuck in a canal.
A traffic jam of astronomical
(spring) proportions.

The push +/- pull of tugboats
make me laugh +/- cry.

Time to start keeping a tally
of things that measure
the length of the Empire State Building
tipped on its side.

An old steel mill skeleton,
now this
rainbow behemoth. We wait
for the tide to refloat it, us.

“Kilroy was here.”
I can’t draw, but you get the picture.
Mittens +/- folding chairs +/-
cats—lots of cats.

In this scenario, are you the boat
or the canal? Tiny bulldozer
or patch of mud? A sign of progress
or Lessepsian migration nightmare?

Are you a strangely beautiful
lionfish spreading venom
within turbid estuaries
or toxic nomad

jellyfish swarming
Mediterranean shores,
or the native meagre
disappearing

before our eyes? A ghost net
or a salt crystal.

The most invasive species at it
again, +/- all I want to know is
who’s going to right +/- refloat
New York’s iconic skyscraper.

Have I even seen one
since watching a herd
of the miniature Icelandic breed
break into fifth gear—
the flying pace—
alongside the winding Ring Road?

Thick waterfall manes + tails
flowing in the wind.

I pause to imagine their dark
silhouettes against a backdrop
of Northern Lights.
I saw them both:
the horses + the lights.
Just not together.

I wait for the great blue ones
to wade + fish
in the Loring Park pond again.
Despite the surface ice,
the ducks have returned.
It will snow again. Animals adapt.

Divide the picture
in half diagonally.

Dare to put the one with wings
in the wedge beneath.
I want to fly again. Head east.
Get a bird’s eye view
wide + long enough to capture all
of New York City’s bridges in one breath.

Head west. I ran across
the Golden Gate Bridge once,
looking for Easter bonnets
in the fog. Sobriety
out of reach
for another year or so.

I never found
your stolen Pegasus.

Would not drown it
in a bucket of salt water
if I did. Did you check
the sky one more time?
On this vernal equinox
after the sun sets so quickly.

Equal parts street pounder + cloud
counter, she may not want to be recovered.

+ thieves come to steal
an hour in the middle of the night.

+ the ice on the pond come March
turns a brilliant slate of blues + grays.

+ after almost three decades
of running along that parkway,
I have just discovered
how red the asphalt is.

+ the snow has finally melted in time
for the next winter storm.

+ it is still winter astronomically speaking,
+ the vernal equinox is six days away.

+ my day dreams will become
perfectly balanced
with the ones I survive
in the wee hours.

+ I will continue to dig through mud
+ mycelium, desperate to unearth a plot

+ eavesdrop on the Sargent cherry
saplings as they awaken.

It was a sharp noise
before my sixth grade teacher
told my mother I needed
to find my own to survive.

A click, a clatter,
a crackle, a clink,
not a clunk.

Will the beautiful people
return when this is over?
Will a new circle be drawn,
this time with a curb cut

to spill us
onto the street
where everyone can begin

to believe
in their own beauty?
They say I wasn’t looking for a party
in the Bertram Woods Branch.

How do they know I wasn’t
dancing in the aisles?
Maybe I did bring in a detachment

of imaginery friends
from the town before to join me.
I wasn’t looking for beauty.
It found me spine-in, signatures flaring.

Just do it.
Turn your entire home
library inside out.

Believe in your body’s motion
+ spatial memory
more than the triggers
of a flood of titles draining

downward. Embrace the beige
+ decaying post-its
(flagging the not to be

forgotten) exposed.
Go ahead—forget.
The imperative will out.
Spring comes to hint

at the moment
it will be safe
to rejoin the herd.

37 or more
decamerons drape stories
like silver webs across empty stages inside once were live venues.

And I whisper, afraid someone will hear:
What if I don’t want to leave
this sanctuary of solitude.

I would lose
my lefty outlaw status.

I would never look up
the etymology of sinister
just to smirk + feign outrage again.

I would write more poems
with cleaner boundaries.

I would not interrupt
myself so much.
Others—who knows?

I would bang on doors
+ ceilings with equal force.

I would not run
any faster or farther,
would not further my daydreams.

I would cut out hearts
less crooked.

I would not remember
my dreams or learn how to recognize
lucid ones any better.

I would smear less,
become more legible.

I would not drink wine
from a glass I hold with my right
hand just to see.

I would even out
the angles + curse less.

I would not know myself
more than I do now. No, I would not
know myself at all.

I. The Salt Before the Wind-Borne

It’s been a year
since you wrote that one about being
lonely for mannequins.
Or were you just looking

for them? It’s so hard to encounter
your barely legible, barely younger
self. Imagine dying
in the arms of the City:

how the Beacon
+ 79th Street Boat Basin
are just the beginning.
A year since you’ve proclaimed

removable limbs come in handy
during pandemics.
You would rather run into the fire
+ risk melting

than strike another
hollow pose.

Do you remember how it feels
not to hear or read the word
pandemic
multiple times a day?

Do you remember why reverse osmosis
made an appearance?
Were you really planning to distill
+ drink your tears as a cure?

This brackish sadness
will outlast the sun.
114 acres here, another spit
of land there—the entire planet.

Reparations or dignity restoration,
how do you quantify incalculable
cruelty? Sins that cannot be
forgiven or forgotten.

There is no pose left to strike
without a match.

II. Broadcast Lightning

I’m always writing two of them
simultaneously, never knowing
where to draw the line
in the mud, how to turn the page

so the ducks can swim in park puddles
again. Drunks too. Here I am desperate
to give reasons why
I became a dandelion.

His breath against my neck,
the freedom to wander,
the truth about weeds,
a wild dance

across the field
before they mow us down.

Aren’t poems equations that can’t be
solved? Things you snap
your fingers to + please
no clapping.

An avalanche
of frozen peas spills into the steamer.
An avalanche
of anguish + anxiety.

An avalanche
of gratitude for the color green
+ tiny globes—
ours is more blue than any other.

And still, this thirst tears us apart,
tree limb by tree limb.

I ran all the way to The Commons
to catch a glimpse of the celestial
horse sculpted from ice.

Wrong commons.
Not an equine in sight.

I should have looked for the aphrodisiac
telephone (off-white version)
in Boom Park

or veiled lady
in Longfellow Park instead.

I think of the forest
behind Chickering Elementary School
where I would go alone

to kill the loneliness
on a playground where the circle dance
children refused to hold my hand.

Not an equine
or lobster in sight.

Just those hot pink lady’s slippers
to beware. So afraid I would step
on one and go to jail.

Not a seahorse anywhere in sight
to protect me.

That time I tripped on the sidewalk
and bloodied my forehead
when I was 18, truth is

I thought I was tripping
on the absinthe I drank that night
from a bottle a college buddy smuggled

in from Spain. The green fairy
and her powers of suggestion,
my excuse for public drunkenness.

Not a lobster

talking on the phone or riding
a horse in sight. And now it’s too late.

She wears real lady’s
slippers in the snow
so she can become
your endangered species.

Precious cargo, she’s some kind
of female Jesus ready to bless
the ice cold river for being
so capable of reducing knots

in the lower back to mere seeds—
the very ones she will plant
to launch a new vertical farm
indoors, capable of rising above

the gravity of the city’s
wooden water towers.

I will never shake the number 3,
forever my place in the line-up.
Moments of stochastic resonance.

There I would sit
on a long wooden bench
and write lines to calm nerves

and crack open scenes of other
stations in or between other cities,
towns, junctions, tiniest of hamlets.

Strangers would talk to travel companions,
most stare at their phones these days,
the rare person reading a book

with real covers and pages inside.
Arrivals and departures
get announced over a PA system.

Of all the depots I have passed by,
all the ones I waited in,
working to believe

my life was about to take off
down its true tracks—
I narrow down the list to these three:

The old San Diego Santa Fe Depot
where I waited for the Pacific Surfliner
to carry me along,

to hug the coast,
destination LA for the first
(and only) time (so far).

A union station where Amtrak,
North County Transit District,
and the San Diego Trolley converge

and diverge. Historic Mission Revival,
redwood beam ceilings, walls covered
in the warmest colored ceramic tiling.

I could write a thousand poems
about my beloved Grand Central
and never scratch the surface

of its celestial music and theater
of crowd and architecture
in perfect choreography.

Instead, I return to the tunnels
beneath New Haven’s Union Station
where I would run

on Friday afternoons
to catch the next Metro-North train
heading to Grand Central.

After I moved to New Haven
to take a break from NYC,
all I wanted was to escape back

to the City every weekend.
Why don’t I have a better memory
of Cass Gilbert’s grand chandeliered interior?

How can I forget Red Wing Station,
just south of the Mississippi,
the first stop after the Twin Cities

on the Empire Builder?
I waited outside
well into a warm summer night

for the perpetually late train
as bats flew overhead and a young man
turned the track into a balance beam.

He knew something.
I know it now.
Not a third rail in sight.

[All the dying that occurs inside.]

The way time passes within without.

A widow stumbles along a passage.

Beakers fill with mystery—an invitation

to rest inside a tiny universe.

My therapist once said

I expanded his world.

I think I may have broken

it [open?].