If you’ve run out of things to say you may need better ideas. Having left the city in a wheeled conveyance. It was one of several periods in a life largely ruled by hand-me-down leopard print. Lacking the whirl and swoop of her language. Airless sunset on the interstate. Advancing into a backyard filled with small white lights. I’d prefer it if timebanks were called laborbanks or skillbanks. Cut off by the tour bus. You haven’t walked down this street for two months & now half the shops are new. No more cookies for breakfast. To always be working & never be finished. Electrical hum & air conditioner hiss. Becca says it’s because we’re living on the internet in real time. I knew I shouldn’t be so scandalized. ALWAYS ALREADY PART OF THE PROBLEM. Itching under the skin of my arms. His mother could as easily have been one of my aunts. The erotic privacy of adolescence. Because in Coleridge it’s all storms and feelings. The pleasure of telling tales on a mutually-reviled acquaintance. Parental fragility. I am a professional & therefore I did not respond with lmgtfy.com. Was poetry ever successfully an art of seduction. I’m speaking historically. How did I give off the scent of caring person & was it too late to change. What do you believe available for your poetry. Kings and Queens. I know I cannot properly see my own biases. As though the page were a container to be filled with the political speech of the moment. But really I came for the couch and the enormous glass of wine. Just another night crying on the subway. I’ve identified a large plate-glass window as a precondition for this afternoon.

I believed I had reasons aside from nostalgia. Kept it cunningly concealed. Changing the water in which the beans are soaking. Just add salt. Waking to the sound of the police chopper. How did you learn to believe you would survive your heartbreak. Bedroom painted womb-red. Champagne wishes & real estate dreams. What morning means in your home. First comes love then comes marriage. Never saw the face of the guy behind us who said if you love me you’ll lose weight. Great relief of a day indoors. I am careful not to bump the perpetually sore bone while lifting my feet onto the couch. Like the time we heard gunshots nearby and froze in the hallway with our hands to the walls. An argument on television in the other room. The singer didn’t know yet about the years of darkness ahead. They told me about the sound the tornado made as it razed the neighboring block. Sound of high heels in the hallway. Getting used to the tightness of underused limbs. The pain of a retrospectively blessed moment. Why did I find the YOU MAKE ME postcard so romantic. Cowering in the hall closet. I believed all spaceships sounded the same. Fight or flight. Giving a child an adult name as an optimistic gesture toward the future. The plant has outgrown its pot. The plan is miles behind us. Portrait of the Artist as Overtaxed Slob. The sentences come in small clusters punctuated by periods of waiting. How to multi-task. Excitement of driving to the museum. First meal of the fall cooked in a huge orange pot. Climbing out of the shower I say I told you so silently to myself.

We thought we could crystallize caring. Watching the umbrellas going by in the street. Sarah calls this studio time although all we’re really doing is thinking and making notes. I was worried about what I could no longer notice. All the beer distributors on their laptops at the counter. I made a note to watch for epic similes. But what if we really do experience thankfulness. I can now see the tree as a storytelling device. Rituals exist because sheer will isn’t enough. Because sheer love isn’t enough. The pop song I remember from 1998. How to see the things that have become invisible to you. We take each ornament from the box. From its bunched tissue paper. Every house a container for objects awaiting their own dissolution. Today I empty the refrigerator and smell each item before replacing it. Attempting to account for the hours we spend under man-made lights. We wanted to believe in the moral uprightness of bedtime. Your complicated scent-distribution machine. Quotation marks around planning. Wanting to lift and arrange the towering sadnesses contained in the season. I write something about the shortening days and the towering workload. But do you have someone to talk to. I think the phrase I used was gently suggest. When the volunteer shift ended without warning. The profound relief of having a place where I was supposed to be in these hours. It’s easy to send an email but sometimes this task takes you days. Did you want to see how mortal we are. Left alone to watch birds fly over a neighboring roof. I made a note to watch for images of height and depth. You make a list in order to cross things off it.

Record sleeves warped and covered in mold. Train train ferry to the small hotel. How to step away from your life and seamlessly reenter. Stay up all night before the flight. What your body does and what you will. I think walking into a cloud is a name for love. You had been at the bottom of a fjord for days. Feeling diminished by what you share with strangers. What I meant by domestic was native to the region. I sighted the path across the meadow. I was in college when this novel was published & therefore recognize its world as one I wanted but could not imagine. A small wooden sign. Scenes of the movie set in years when I knew those subcultures. As though photography had the witchy powers anthropologists claimed. The sadness of discovering adult life was not significantly different from what preceded it. Had walking become a way of seeing or a form of speech. Writing from the coast of her loneliness within marriage. Who is and is not an intellectual. How to lock up your brilliance in heterosexual commitment. I mean really it’s all body body body around here. Squinting at my reflection to check skirt length. I was on the couch before the sun came up reading their statistics. How we had traveled through time and returned weeks later. The man’s elbow resting on my arm & gut. All the brilliant men and their women at a dinner party in Paris decades ago. What does research look like. The tearing sound when something pries loose. I wake up early and write this poem without coffee or tea.

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.