Author: Why Are You Yelling?
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In Preparation
When we walk at night with the ghosts of New York, we float above grates and glass; we have hit our heads on concrete before— we have jumped from buildings, sank. We spent a year wrapped in blankets, emerged drunk, slightly shrunken; we had films for expression, books for quotations, but no banners for our…
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May Flowers
I took the W on my way downtown to Battery Park and a homeless man was cleaning himself methodically in the seats diagonal to mine. Take off shoe, take off sock, wipe, clean. Somewhere around City Hall, he took out an air freshener and sprayed the air above, around, and underneath him, and I thought,…
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Weather Channel
Your back turned, a broken compassvibrating faulty,stays shadowed despitethe moonlight-in-the-window. The ghosts living betweenour clothes, the dinner talksof porch lights.The apple-picking offorgotten thought,and allotted time fortouching fingers.I keep my front to your back,my knees closed, jointly pointing. The rain stays south,but not forever. Findwest-bound with your compass.Walk there gently,new figure in the window.I will never…
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10 Years
Sitting in a tub, behind the curtain, with fingers lightly thumping porcelain: after thirty-three hours of praying, she came down from the ceiling. It’s the big blue chair that my mother loved, with upholstery maintained and bottom scuffs, that followed me to Brooklyn. Massive, it didn’t come apart in the middle like lounges made after…
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In Rockefeller
I can’t see the ground around me justumbrellas overlapping in the raineverywhere as people stand.(I don’t own one—with which to overlap or to be overlapped.The wet always comes in anyway.Not with two?But, surely, the wind…) The rain falls in sheetslike summer lined-laundryand I can only think of ruinedpicnics; Cental Park certainly deserted—sinking ground, soaked benches.The…
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Engaged
When I dreamed of screaming, your eyes were a dizzy kaleidoscope. On my bed. The ceiling was our future, wet with paint and silver like lost fog. (Said much prior: I finger in your name on the dust of dressers, on the windowpanes of outdoor shops— I read it on the wrinkles of clothes during…
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Saving Lives
Make sleep be drunk under lemonpeel stars, beneath the canopied bed I am moon-sunk. Stuck to the bed by the weight of the dark, I dream: My mother is old, not buried, her hair wound in a bun. Carnival spun cotton candy blue pink wisps. She says In the morning your ribcage pulls apart easily.…
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Montage with Light Against My Back
When I dreamed of sleeping,your eyes were a dizzy kaleidoscope.On my bed. The ceiling was our future,wet with paint and silver like lost fog. (I finger in your name on the dust of dressers,on the windowpanes of outdoor shops—I read it on the wrinkles of clothes during damp days.) My eyes, a strange piano note.Plucked…
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Of the Past
It’s sitting in your car one winter in Rotterdam that I tell you your future. It’s quiet except for my voice like a radio buzz shaking the car slightly, and the streets are dreams with edges that fall off. We drive into the headlights, past the field that makes us feel rural, so unmoving and…
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In a Peruvian restaurant
In a Peruvian restaurantsomewhere in the LowerEast Side, I sit beside a friend,and across from his friend, and his friend’s boyfriend. Swirling the strawberry margarita around in my mouth,hoping to taste the tequila,I cross my feet under the table. Uncross.Cross.Uncross. I realize, as the ice cubesmelt in my water glass,that I haven’t said a wordin an hour…
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