Fall falls faster than phone calls
I forget to return. They slip,
missed, as afternoons burn,
smoldering, into evenings.

(we sift through the ashes for survivors)

I left, swept myself down snowy
subway station steps,took one train
to another, till, home, I find a plastic carton
filled with love letters and ticket stubs under my bed.

(I found a poem in arabic and a pressed black-eyed susan)

January, white-skied, I barely felt it leave.
The city blocks shuttle wind fresh as
a new wound, cut it like granite into
icy streams that trace streets that
frost my backbone

(I lost my favorite green sweater)

Last night, I dreamt I couldn't sleep.
I didn't know that I was just imagining
pitching my body, a small boat, sheets
tangling like gusting sails.
I dreamt I lay awake and
shaking with waves of
panic that I'd never sleep again
and then, I woke up

I was standing in the shower.
I was tugging my fingers through wet warm knots of hair
when I remembered: tiny girl,
the darkest eyes. She was the color
of a bosc pear. I remember
she stood in my doorway once,
her small brown mouth full of whipped cream.
She laughed and white ran down her chin.

It is brilliant and horrible
when things you already know
rearrange themselves.
It was standing in the shower
that I somehow let her reweave herself.
Her father, ugly and nervous,
pulling me into the hall. I had forgotten
how strange his face had seemed.
When I found her, she was curled
into a little lump on her mattress
on the floor.

What a flash you were!
What a sudden shock, as if
I'd traced the dark shadow of
a power socket, curious and
zapped like a mosquito, quick and brilliantly sharp.

I had neatly wiped you from my
windhield like a dead wet
dragonfly with its wings swung
open on their small hinges. I
very nearly believed that I had
really killed you. Our puncture wounds
have been gauged, multiplied,
deepened and I hated that you
could never fill me all the way. SO
I bleached you out, left a
chemical stiffness.

But, oh, what a thrill, I never
really forgot the look of you.
You came back one night and
what a wave you were, a frothy
wash, an undertow that spun
me, dragged at my feet, the way you,
loud, crash and slide away.

sister

we are sitting sipping
coffees with ice from
plastic cups in the sun,
next to hipster boys in
neckerchiefs and cigarettes.

We would seem inseperable
loves to anyone. Fourteen and
nineteen we share tee shirts and
sneakers, wear our hair in
the same long shaggy wave.
We are blonde and lanky and
crossing our legs, chewing our
purple fingernails, pushing
up our sunglasses, drumming our
fingers, touching our knees,
dragging short stumps of chalk
across the asphalt. I desperately
wish I could read her mind.

To every girl in pleated trouser pants on the train

We spill yellow splenda packets
into black coffee that we sip
through tight mouths, keep
our fingernails clipped to
reasonable lengths. We
drum them against the plastic
blue cool of the 6 train. Oh
Manhattanite girls, how much
we haven't seemed to change since
we were four years old. This is
one big game of dress-up. I line
my closet with sensible sling-backs.
And this morning meditation, this
dark rumble to our lectures and
cubicled internships, this is
our tea party. We have traded
china sets for styrofoam cups and
insolated travel mugs but I still
feel like I'm pretending.

We do not usually share

a bedroom like this, three
twin beds pushed against opposite
walls. At night I listen to
their breath from across
the strange shape of floor space
between us. When it is not warm
and rhythmic, I ask into the
blackness with a voice that
tumbles into whisper as I form it,
are you awake?

and sometimes I get an answer
in the slightest voice, the
tiniest affirmation, as if the
silence and darkness is sacred,
holy, that we dare not upset. This
is how we live now, upon
eggshells, we are three
girls tiptoeing across tightropes made of
ice crystals. We are familiar with
falling. We should be stomping
on every surface we can find,
unabashedly unafraid of anything but
we don't. We still whisper across
the bedroom, still dart
like
pinballs through the kitchen.
I know that voice at night.
I know how sometimes we cannot
fall asleep because horrible things
happen randomly. I know sometimes
we can't sleep because we can't
understand this. I know that
staying up to stare into
ceilings is not calming, their
blankness boils our insides into
vapor, steam that casts curling shadows
over our thin eyelids. Ugly, I don't
know why. I prefer the nights
when i can fall asleep to the
sound of them breathing in warm
rhythmic bursts.

Getting Better.

You will master the backwards step onto the scale.
It is scary at first. You are quivering and thin
and always, always cold. It takes faith to step up
backwards, it is hard not to twist your little bird neck
towards the metal shudder of the scale weights.
She never writes the number down-- too risky, you
might see. You will memorize your silhouette in
creased paper gowns that tie at the small of your back,
the way it stiffly sinks into the trenches that your collarbones make.
You think you look almost Amazonian-- broad at the top,
a triangle of a torso.
You are no warrior. The nurse will later tell you that
you are green and blue. Your hair falls out in clumps.
Hospital socks-- they are thick and grey. You cannot shave
your legs. You cannot throw up your cereal. It is a
sterile hell, a secret cave for the very barely living
to rest the bones that push against their skin like
fingers against fabric. Haunting girls, gaunt faces,
and in the morning you bend over with your side to the
mirror to count ribs through your back.
And there they are, relief, like tiny ripples.
You will horde little things--batteries, dry-erase markers, paper clips--
to drop through the gap that forms between your thighs when you
sit down. You must do this every hour, just to reassure yourself
that they can still fit through, that you have not magically expanded.
And the truth is, you are magically expanding. It's inevitable.
You are gaining weight or dying. Soon, the way your
kneebones touch, the way you fit your fingers beneath your ribs, the
jagged edges of your wrists, your chin--
all these things soften, You are no longer pure angles and
the rhythm of a steady pulse is heart-wrenching.

Small-town America,

the suburban sprawl that
spat me out is
standing water. I am
stagnating here. For all
the common reasons, of course:
I am young andd this town
is dull and still, too
silent. I have too much
kinetic energy running the
length of my skin. I'm
restless.
But, there is something else,
in the sterility of identical
air-conitioned colonials, with
flat lawns and landscaping--
shrubs like little soldiers.
There is something in
the way these neighborhoods sit,
in the boxy build of houses.
At night, they look like
empty puppet stages, dark
blue and dead. I can't
put my finger on exactly
what I hate so much but
it is lodged in between these
pastel shoeboxes, in the
shady strips of side-yard
that divide us. It hangs
heavy in the air between
my neighbors. We are striving
to be seperate; there is
no shared space.

I have Roman candles
for sisters,
long, thin, and exploding
in hot, spark-stewing
bursts. Beautiful girls, I
watch them when they
do not think I'm
looking. How could I
not? This is a miracle.
They twist like braids into
real people now.

I am an atheist's daughter

My father did not find God
not in all the Sunday mornings
when he sat with Southern Baptists.
He met grief and saddness faithless,
because the universe is aimless.
I am a Catholic's daughter.
My mother, always shameless,
told me in her tamest voice her own
convictions, she wore short wool skirts
even in the winter. Nuns bruised
her knuckles and she told me
God is something sweet
benevolent and loving
that I will find somewhere someday.
My halves joined, built a house
in which we did not speak of deities.
He saw almighty intervention in algebraic equations,
in computer code. There's no creator--
just creation.
She believed in something and it couldn't be drummed out of her
And when she died we mourned her in a church
and met a pastor.

I know I am caught writing poem
after poem after
poem: odes to the girls
who have perfected the
backwards step onto the scale
who know by uneven hearts their
silhouette in neatly creased
paper dresses. they tie at
the small of the back, shivering
in plastic chairs swinging
unshaven calves.

this is a sterile temple. Once you
leave you crave that chemical
scented silence.

I know I am stuck writing
poem after poem after
poem, odes
to the girls who have perfected the art of
getting on scales backwards.

Manhattan, I sleep in the bed

by the radiator
by the window in the room
on the east side, my slice of
space wedged nearly in the steeple of
the episcopal church so I wake up to bells and
the sun in my crepe paper flowers
that catch the light in folds
of pink and orange. by morning
I am sweating. Broadway and I
are bedfellows; it runs from my toes to
my head. I fall asleep with my cheek to
its breast on the chest of heaving
sirens, of street cleaners and
car alarms. I wake to Church bells and
taxis caught in my sheets and
this city is like sex, an energy caught in
bed, an intenseness that
sleeps until church bells, awakens,
stretches its limbs inside my
skin on skin, a friction, the
heat from car exhausts.

in my house the silence

was so huge, it
strained the walls; it
pushed into my room;
it tugged the sheets off my
toes and we
were all deafened.
in my house, we
used to line our linoleum and
hard wood with eggshells,
empty white whole halves
upon which I would
only pray to be so light
so as to tread but
no. we never were, it
would not do. I wore
ballet shoes that forced
my feet into perfect
rounded semi-circle
points. they laced up
to my knees. I swam laps
until my skin reaked of chlorine (that
chemical tinge, I sweetened it with
perfume). I scrubbed those
fucking floors with vinegar, let
my knees get sore and
soaking but I have not yet learned what I have done so wrong.