Light Being Light
At nineteen, sharing the bed with a
blind woman from the shelter and her black
cat, too sick to speak on my worst
days, of course I was afraid.
Each dawn the smarting sky
froze into an endless pool of
gold-flaked ice, its vast twisted corpse
hiding a corpse. When I approached
I saw myself suspended in resin.
Jinx! I needed nothing to
know that I was gone.
Light being light, I saw what I saw.
Men being men, they left me with
nothing but my body.
Of course I screamed. Of course
people didn’t hear. My death was
quick and unspectacular. The first
responders were like yeah we
see this all the time. Blind woman
told me what her husband did to her
until the morning light indicted him.
Violets grew like bruises in the yard
while soil sat unwatered,
xeric and sightless. I’d been too
young for years and was happily
zombified. The future was over. Even I knew.
Sea Level
You bit your nails to bone
that summer. It was the year of homemade bombs
and your bullshit bank teller job, snipers on the roof
of the Hilton Garden Inn. You hugged me, but
your face was hard
when I saw it. Bituminous. August
in my rented backyard. The bees are dying in waves
but that day, there were so many. In your final city,
the spines of streetlights melt,
scoliotic, into the sidewalks. Soon,
the experts drone, this place will be uninhabitable.
I have forged an island
atop your absence. Each day I wake
closer to sea level. It was never supposed
to be like this. You’re dead; I’m
reading Rilke on the roof. Night rises
like heat from the sidewalk. The expressway glares
back at me in heterochromic beats, red, white, red,
white, cells of blood, breathing. I don’t write
these days. God can’t love you
the way I do, will never know you
like I know you. You’re a casual fan of the future
but you don’t want to live there, like a city you know
is too dirty, too busy. Living fossil,
fata morgana, I told you the truth. This world a sum
of all I’ve lost and all that’s left. This emptiness
Oulipan. You’d rather die
than live with it.
In this alone we differ.
Bad Nostalgia
“I dreamed I forgot you/but to dream you was remembering.”
—Leila Chatti, “I Dreamed I Forgot”
It’s a privilege to say goodbye. This is what I told
myself when I woke and learned you were gone, back before I knew
I would survive. I was young then, alone
in a lab-grown womb, no mother nor human proxy to speak of.
Learned the uses of a body in a windowless room.
I’ve got bad nostalgia for it all. Loneliness made sense then.
Not now, among the living, pretending I never left.
It’s okay. I can’t complain. I go to work, go to school,
come home, say I’d rather kill myself than go
to the grocery store, and go to the grocery store.
This is not to say I am insincere. I mean
it all. I climbed to the rooftop
because I wanted to fall. Been touched
by so many strangers, I can’t bear it from the people I love.
Like a dead language, I want to be known
but I don’t know how. Can’t stop making plans
for the past, can’t bear the filthy aperture between my legs,
the angry white light of the world as it reopened for me
but not you. Last I saw you, leaves drifted, hypnotic,
to the icebound ground. Corner of your mouth
occupied by a cigarette, the other a joint,
smoke pouring from each orifice like an apartment fire,
you said Some things never change and I agreed,
although this did. You are never alive in my poems.
For this, I cannot forgive myself. Last night, I had a smoke
on the roof and thought of you,
our last apple cider, November then and now, autumn air
so sharp my blood slowed to a crawl like commuters
in the one-way tunnel of the heart, cold as the night you told me
you felt like you were dying, which you turned out
to be right about, if only just that once.
