5 Poems

 

Skein

You say, where you are, it becomes difficult to read. 
So, you point to a word, and I tell you that one is "skein," the word for
When ducks fly in a V. And this? That one is "well," as in a
Drinking well. And this?
I say it's one of my favorites: "River."

You continue pointing but I say, wait,
We should be spending this moment taking 
A photograph.
So I get up to look for a camera but cannot 
Find one in this home where I keep three cameras, not including 
The one on my phone.

Please, just wait, I say
And then I wake up.
Bandagedly, I think
I should have just stayed there with you,
Grateful to have had a moment
Reading you words.



To Be Clear, I Will Keep Recycling

How quickly it becomes mundane, these feet
And feet of snow. At some point, it just becomes cold to stay

Outside. It is Saturday, and I want to drink so much coffee that I feel sick
Of all the coffee I must drink to get by in a workweek. But walking to Oslo

Cafe in this weather, I think the world has finished being beautiful
Or maybe I am just tired. How tired am I if I never let myself feel it

With all this caffeine? I realize I haven't heard the birds
For a while, and I wonder how long it's been—and was that just now

A sparrow? How long after the last American Tree Sparrow disappears
Will I remember how it sounds? Their arctic nesting places keep shrinking

Each time I don't separate the plastic lid from my paper coffee cup
Is the great green Coca-Cola lie, while the unwashed truth is that

A year of Coke’s plastic-making can't be offset by a lifetime of recycling
By two hundred thousand people. Just like, in the summer, it won't matter

If I chuck my cup into the river, since the way the tide tends, it will return
To me with the thousands of dead menhaden in the Hudson

At Cherry Walk, where I will pick it up and place it into the well-meaning
City recycling, where most objects start their journey to the municipal

Landfill. And I will know that it is spring from the new Shen Yun posters
Much after the first daffodils bloom, because we are now in the perpetual season

Of unseasonable weather, and the thing about normality is that
There's always a new normal.



I'll Be There Soon

The last time that I saw your family, you said
"I'm taking shape inside an empty promise," and you
Can't remember the last time that you felt
Alright at the supermarket.

I try to pull back from the army but I
Forget sleep and I kamikaze. I let
My friends pile up in the kitchen
And SoHo.

Your shattered light is enough for me to cling
Onto every stumbled photograph.
I never thought I would be anywhere else 
But here. You shred into me like a 
Gentle autograph.

Your sister called in a flicker panic, but your husband 
Found you by the Gossip Girl fountain.
You said you learned to kiss from the tv, and you didn't 
Know what that said about you back then.

If you come back from the Garden, I'll powder 
Off my old waiter's jacket, and if 
You ask me to pick you up,
I'll be there soon.



The Dangers of the World Can Be Expressed as Cigarettes

Life scientists lined up some graphs and found that
If I have a bad day at work, it's as good for my health
As smoking twenty cigarettes.
Per these same life scientists: a cigarette shaves

Fifteen minutes off your life.
So my terrible-as-twenty-smokes workday
Shortens me by five hours.
Per these same life scientists: the time my 4th grade teacher

Told me I would not see my Buddhist grandmother
In heaven (i.e., she had gone to the other place that burns
Hotter than any butane lighter, and
By the way, was my grandfather also Buddhist? Yes? Well.)

Was too many cigarettes for a ten-year old.
The clogged air of the average American
City means we breathe half a cigarette each day
In pollution alone.

And when LA burned up—the winter David Lynch
Died—the chemist air was as bad as ten cigarettes.
But Haley tells me that you could burn
One quadrillion cigarettes and still fall short

Of all the planet's greenhouse gases.
I wonder blankly to myself
What kind of lung cancer
This would leave a planet with.



In the Morning

I am like biting into a branzino
—All bones and all cold, so I would've
Thought I'd've met the preferences
Of a Nord.
But instead, a Brazilian

Figured she would keep me. Today,
I woke up with the words for it:
The sense I get when my forehead presses
Against your shoulder is the first scent
Of the sea breeze

Through opened windows in the morning.
And every way I wake up to you is a new way
For me to find motes of sunlight—made delicate by you,
The taste of coffee—made good by you,
And so many birds—turned themselves into you.