The past’s rage as the break approaches. Because of my gender I was playing the role of material life. I guess I wanted a way into myself. New shoes and new eyes. Ladies and gentlemen please be patient. IT’S NOT A CRISIS IT’S A SCAM. Could hear the train coming through the sound of crickets. I wanted to love you like a light slowly illuminating from underneath. Because having a body means doubting. All the tapping feet. Suddenly in the diner an entire ocean. Little liver that could. Lying on the floor breathing deeply. What I mean is. Is everybody comfortable. Something made me speak as though I were sure. How long is it permissible to grieve a lost love and when did he return to himself. Hearing the pitch of movement slowly rise. How darkness presses down above the well-lit station. I need to find my own card she said plaintively. What it means to survive. Is anybody hearing this. There were people everywhere willing to speak to and of power. High speed lights from the south. How a revolution once meant something cyclical. Your aphorisms read twice. Breathing into the knot of pain. So many choices with negligible difference between them. This is called a market. The thinking part and the stuff part combine to make a person. You carry the notebook. You keep showing up. Expired referral. Wind in your ears. All the poets on the blog trying to say what love is. A hand held to keep you upright. Sand all over the sidewalk. They are singing in the stopped train’s car. The moon waxes and wanes. You knew in writing before you knew in speech.

Some morning glories still hanging on past Thanksgiving. I couldn’t tell if the book was a fascist fantasy or a paranoid fantasy. Omnidirectional violence. You can’t just Urban Dictionary it. All the Christmas bulbs swaying on their fishing lines. Always on the edge of illness. I wanted to tell you about the Justin Timberlake song’s instrumental rendition. I had packed pajamas and toiletries and left my suitcase in my office during the rally. Lying in bed and reading off your phone screen for hours. It’s not a crisis it’s a plan. Years later I suddenly realize the boundary he’d tried to set. Dollar bills taped to the wall & curling away. What is the relationship between the past the future the present. How to still this incessant panic. Wanting to hold your hand although or because I didn’t agree with you. Was it a poem or a lab notebook. We wanted to be like tinsel moving slightly in the breeze. But also to lift our voices into the rapidly darkening park. I don’t believe that these judgments are valueless. It’s not an opportunity it’s a scam. The photograph of the bar façade made something small clench in your torso. How you learned where your home was. What kinds of healing ritual. I had to ask my students if I was using the slang term correctly. Resting your wrists on the cool cement counter. It’s not a plan it’s a coincidence. I had lost faith in the strength of professionalism. Instead I began class by talking about Beyoncé. The way the neglected body feels. When Christmas trees start to show up near bars’ front doors. We were crossing state lines to eat and lie on the couch. My body so full of history by which I mean chemicals. Wanting to know if geography means space. If history means time. The large Ziploc container of powdered cocoa. What did we believe about borders. When I looked up the book I found a page of quotes and each was the thing I most needed to read. Who slipped into the demonstration quietly and retreated into a police officer’s car. You know what they say about paranoia. All the bloody seams slowly unraveling.

Pushed with both hands against the promised land. Who approached the cathedral. I read the essay on my phone. Wiping tears away with less & less subtlety. Waiting for the moment the heat shuts off at 6. The speculative nature of global geography. Was it In the Pines or House of the Rising Sun. Capsized moon over Morningside Park. Pages falling from the notebook to the floor. You walked by the apartment dominated by a large wall clock. I was in your mother’s hospital room. Trying to be a thinner membrane. Was this a memory or a dream. In the rose garden overlooking Long Island Sound. All this before the world changed. The large brown ceramic cup full of crushed ice and mint. We all pretended we were a boy becoming a man. We fantasized living in the boutique hotel. When the new millennium started in earnest. Printing up the tax records to take to the clinic. After receiving three drunk texts I thought maybe I didn’t say my husband enough. Health care a persistent low-grade fever in the system. The work has no endpoint. All the young literary men are out at the bar. Were you walking away or standing still. The day already past apex. Car horns and the sound of a plane passing over. Your summer my winter. Your morning is my night. Is there a word for the way the ghouls move down the aisle. Not walking. Not dancing. Being a stubborn and glaring stone. Having hunkered down in your refusals.

The year when all I read about was what it would take for the Gulf Stream to shut down. You know how the day will end if the computer isn’t off by eleven. Becoming an ambassador of efficiency techniques. Holding it in. Whatever it is. Your posture veering away on the subway. The job that left you always at a deficit and the anger that moved around inside you while you did it. The process of writing is mostly a process of ego inflation and deflation. Psychic breathing. The way the sky is invisible from my living room window. You checked off the boxes that proved you were or could be ok. Some electrical hum. Debris on the stairs. How to count the number of trains you’ll need at the beginning of the week. How to make a small economy. The pit of my stomach when I bought the health insurance. Three thousand two hundred and four dollars. A disagreement about whether saving money or paying debts comes first. What it would mean to resist the economies that threaten via withheld promises. How credit means character and who gets to have either. Car horns from outside the school or the gas station. Waking up into the conditions of shortage after the storm. I grew up with money and then I guess walked away. Sometimes when I think of the future all I can see is ocean. Dead zone in the Pacific. The Atlantic’s trail of bodies and those bodies in history that crossed Earth’s oceans breathing the open air. The difficulty of talking about conditions not feelings. Woke up like this. Looking for the dust cloth to give my hands something to do. The line between a performance and a service. How ten years passed without leaving a mark. The only motion today will be across this room.

Googled the difference between description and naming. Performing speech acts alone and in pajamas. What kinds of plurals live in this weather. Slightly slimy feeling of the skin while moving through the city summer. I cleared a space for rhetoric. Sun pounding down all around you. In the dream she was alive and ran a restaurant in a Queens rowhouse. I sat at the table with composure. Is aging an effect of the body or of time. Little green strips laid end-to-end. New holes in your shirt. Drinking ginseng through a tiny straw. Her face was wider and more freckled. The opposite of winter. So hemispheric. Quoted the activist meeting while wondering how to define activism. How to articulate a position from afar. I remembered how he’d said I’ll call right back and then weeks passed. How the new place fits you like a hand-me-down coat. The fountain dried up and the ache after a day on your feet. Artmaking as a voluntary and uncompensated simulacrum of labor. Working my way into productive discomfort. This helped me know what not to expect. I imagined a t-shirt and then there it was. The pair of dirty socks left on the floor. Violent rocking of the ceiling fan. All the stars I imagine outside the city limits. Cooperative. Cheerful. How the noise of the air conditioner drowned out the movie dialogue. The sunburn peeling in centimeter-long strips. Wanting to walk through the coolness of the morning. Knowing how to make the string tight enough. Most of what I saw was a pair of buildings I went back and forth between. A perfect photo of pastel apartment trim. The problem is my feet not my shoes. New Haven Style Pizza delivered in the Texas night. Googled what kind of language is a description. In the dream she regarded me pleasantly but without recognition.

Let me call you when I’m off work. The shirtless man sleeping on the church steps. The scar running laterally up his belly. Wanting the little spaces of freedom inside an absolute structure that flows between time and space. Your foot dragging in the river beside the boat. A little snag in thinking. How I finally learned my bra size. It’s about everything else. The oiliness of good coffee. What goodness might mean and whether it has relevance for this historical moment. Totally administrated. Rooms for thinking or for fucking in. I hold my desirability tentatively and with deep ambivalence. Fly me to the moon. Sound of something unseen being dragged outside. The way the market might want something. What you learn about your clothing once you wear it outside the home. Sweeping the rug into some state of newness. Like hands on your windpipe. Like cold hands inside you. The pride I took in my own peripherality. My stance of non-involvement in things like fame or belonging. How fast and small every movement was then. Counting the recessed lines of bricks and the cement windowsills. When my reputation might mean my paycheck. How you stood at the edge with your eyes all over everything. Kids with cameras. Wanting to be pressed down onto a couch or bed by a stranger’s nonsexual hands. Wanting to be held suspended. Even I can’t hear voices from elsewhere so well anymore. Even I fantasized walking as an approximation of freedom. Liberty always in process and never achieved. I said as a poet I am naturally shy. Archived all your bodily aches as though you might appeal to them later. As though these cast-iron buildings might have had some other fate than condos and flagship stores. Pale blue all the way upriver. Rest your head on the oil-smudged window. Wanting to be a string of small acts of care. Laughter from the street below. The eerie familiarity of the man in the coffeeshop. Language making a small despair in the middle of the day like a hole into which you might breathe. What kind of work did you think these poems would do for someone else. On the bedspread on the concrete floor I tried to make a space for something new.

We practiced wiping sweat from our necks. Every song reminds you of a person you once knew. Then the heat kicked on with much hissing and clangor. I had crafted a parasitic practice that transformed my paid labor into post-market froth. Was it a field or was it a city. I wanted to lie down at the edge. The breeze just before the train’s headlight appears. You were making yourself a foreign continent. Feeling around the blunt edges of history. But medieval women may not have been so submissive. Standing on the sidewalk surrounded by luggage. Do you worry about what happens to humor when language moves away from a body. Is this getting too repetitive I asked though I was not even halfway done. Made an argument about the congruence of Lancelots. The children. The children. The protective phone case bought a day too late. I’d promised someone today would end. But somehow we found ourselves in Queens. Falling behind in the assignments you’ve set for yourself. Preferring to repair rather than to replace. Your body is so seasonal. Jo said one was quiet and proper and one was a screaming wench. Fluffing the covers and turning on the fan. Trying a new stairwell but finding nothing nothing nothing. Here I will comment on the flexibility of the form. A model of the world or a model of the self. You were watching it all with your microscopic eye. Sometimes you slip back into 2007 for just a moment. Memory of a hotel bed & whatever the opposite of seduction might be. I was trying to get it all down into words. Movement had become a precondition for air circulation.

Picnicked near the Don’t Insult The Witch sign. Broke the stove again. You learn a thing in one place and write it down in another. Wanting to get out into the world. Tight shoe or pregnancy. Here you are humming around the apartment and refilling various glass jars. When they enter the poem. Blurry & on the horizon. Who left these jackets by the stairwell. In the morning made of traffic and voices you sleep through hours of sunlight. Maybe this is a kind of diffuse epistolary novel. Smudge of paint on the keyboard. On deadline as a permanent state. On the wrong side of Fortuna’s wheel & brimming with dailiness. Dearest liberty having taken you. Everyone adjusting their scarves in the new season. I liked the openly boring ones best. How could you make a poem into a tiny room. Predictors included writing or thinking. The carbon monoxide monitor beeps. How the coffee seemed to move around inside you reshaping your body in tiny ways. Almost too gentle to count as an allusion. Lingered on. How can I tell you what the afternoon has done. Holding his daughter’s hand and looking into his phone. Still thinking about the problem of audience. Enthusiasm of a new friendship three drinks into the end-of-summer party. The word social indicates a certain kind of bar. To be at a certain place in life. What labor might mean to a given person. What justice might look like at fifteen or twenty or thirty or forty. How many times can I pull this one off.