You like dive bars, and so do I.
Walking away, my heels lick the road.
No one knows this city like we know this city.

From behind, you bent—
kissed the hook of my back.
Like a tree, carving your name on me.
All around me is stale water.

I look at my hands, think:
these will decay some day.
These will decay and
the things touched—
Your lids close when I look back and
I adhere my hands to the wall and wait.

Down in the cellar,
she smoked hidden cigarettes—
the atmosphere of what she wants.
I stand with the face of a dead woman, my palms up on the counter.
Sometimes you find out things on trains, I think.
Sometimes it’s very inconvenient.

I finally sat down and connected the lines I was gathering for a found poem based on Craigslist’s m4w Missed Connections section. I mostly wanted to write it for the first line—the first line is just awesome (and, absurdly, I wish it had been posted for me). Also, the OkCupid email on the bottom of this post has nothing to do with this, but I just found it hilarious when it arrived in my inbox the morning of my birthday and feel the need to share my apparent spinsterhood with the world. The internet is so weird. Continue reading →

In the night, the building is still—the pipes dry, the floorboards cold.
Everything is tainted a strange gray, only sleep is in color.
The passing train vibrates her stomach like an eager violin and she knows:
Every night we surrender ourselves—
she will die tonight and wake up tomorrow reborn.
The ghosts of the old Jewish hospital bow their heads.

The ceiling soundlessly parts with the walls, evaporates—
after-blizzard clouds float lazy and full overhead.
Above her, the stars are suspended lanterns,
while in bed, she’s a tree-stuck kite.

The shadows step forward, offering colored balloons
to lift her into the disinterested sky—
she tries to fuse them, loses all but one, shrinks as they distantly pop.
She holds the lingering blue balloon firmly,
keeps it from swimming away.
She remains earth-yoked but looks constantly
toward the balloon as it sways against the sky;
connected, they both dance.

In Common

My father dove through the sky 19 times—
once while I watched.
No more than four, I only remember his last ten feet
and then ground, the parachute like a dress around him.

Now, on a drive up to Sacandaga Lake:
a diver swimming down toward the trees,
lazily falling like a belated gift.
The colors of his fall were an amusement park,
his chute a ferris wheel and his body a lollipop.

He said, He’s an amateur;
the trained like to dance in the sky,
playing all the way down—flips, tricks. 
(At 10: With an umbrella, he jumped off the roof,
trying to fly. Broke leg, mother’s nerves.)

I always took the first jump, with anything;
none of my kids are that way.
It’s true—I will never fall from a plane.
A roller coaster drops my stomach,
no recovery from Down to Up.

It’s too fast for that, your insides unaware.
You drop your hands from the side of the plane
and you feel like you’re floating—
you’re actually just going down, too quickly.
You don’t even know that you’re falling.
A familiar feeling.