Brooklyn August was the cool

blue of the L train the
thick wet breath at the
mouth of the subway the
way my legs felt against
each other, bare and so
strange the watery
glimpses of myself I
caught in plexiglass
windows the funny signs
I could not understand
the heat, the young hascids
in mini-vans and long
sleeves, the reggaeton across
the street that one
blue dress I wore so
much the softest skin I've
ever felt the sour
smell of weed and rot the
white kids riding ten speed
bikes that boy who
cooked me artichokes and
sleeping with my windows open.

18th birthday eve 2007

"she doesn't have any hate"
we broke beer bottles, jelly jars,
china plates and wine glasses against some granite
we found along route 25, toasted tequila shots
to our dead mothers, or something? I guess
the symbolism was lost on me, but
I like to drink and break shit

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.

To every girl in pleated trouser pants on the train

We spill yellow splenda packets
into black coffee, sip
through tight mouths, keep
our fingernails clipped to
reasonable lengths. Drum them against the
plastic blue of the 6 train. Oh
Manhattanite girls, how much
we haven't seemed to change; this is
one big game of dress-up. I line
my closet with sensible sling-backs.
And this morning meditation, this
dark rumble to lectures and
cubicled internships, a tea party where we've
traded up to insolated travel mugs but I still
feel like I'm pretending.

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 torso.
You are no warrior.
The nurse will tell you later 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 sharp 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.

I have Roman candles
for sisters,
long, thin, and exploding
in hot, spark-spewing
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 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
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 reeked 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.

there is a futility to writing

love poems, you will
never want to read them
again after he is gone and
no one wants to hear you
pining over perfect somethings:
shoulders or the curves
of lips or arc of necks
beneath sheets in the
morning, so I don't write odes to these things.
you can find them anywhere. this
is a new and revolutionary sort of
love and I will not
write you another word about it now.

Yes, I have noticed that you
want me, though you may sit just
behind me I have seen the way you
watch my hand when it is resting on
my thigh and I have seen you
regard me like that, psychology class
I nap during movies and sometimes
you suggest that I could find someone
to appreciate my greatness. sometimes
you suggest things that make me want
to take off my clothes but of course
there is no greatness. there is only
the way my legs tingle, shy, in
the places where you are looking

Academia is, you know, dizzying.

so much opportunity and no
specific idea what to do with it.
I was worrying yesterday then
Dad called. told me about buying pumpkins.
felt a weird homesick tug for new england
foliage and gourds.
stew leonards.
wait, fuck that now I remember:
autumn in high school: so self-aware
it hurts at football games,
who will keep the drugs in their glove compartment?