The city sounds like the muted trumpet beats of a the nineteen year old protege.
Who is sitting in the shadow of the black cube sculpture on Astor Place.
There's a sixteen year old waiting for the subway,
She is singing alone, to You Make Me Feel So Young, while her absent-minded mother snaps along.
Tonight she will relive the boys she has known, who have held her waist and kissed her mouth and
She won't feel anything because
she is unconsciously dancing to the trumpet music and jazz playing around her in Washington Square.
Aug 8, 2011
Aug 8, 2011 at 7:54 AM UTC
I'm not looking for your face
in the lights that flash by
the subway car window.
All blue, red and white blurs
across my irises.
The train ran parallel to another
and in the adjacent car
there was a boy,
my age,
rapping and spilling
parts of his soul
to an empty subway car.
His headphones loud and blaring,
he didn't see me.
I don't think he was looking.
Aug 8, 2011
Aug 8, 2011 at 7:48 AM UTC
We have a brownstone townhouse kind of love
The kind that we can cover with the murals of our madness
With the paint of our perfection
That's built on the floorboards of our expectations
The number always changes but the people never seem to
I would like our love
To not be measures in square feet,
But with the creeping doors and narrow staircases.
The closets stopped hiding the things we asked them to
And my skeletons lay sprawled
All hip bones
Vertebrae
and rib cages
What has become of me?
I asked myself
and your look said unfamiliarity
and an animosity
Which I never thought possible.
Your smile spelt out greed
And your vocal chords never articulates the syllables I wanted them to.
You used me.
An I fell for it.
Is love just muscle memory?
Are we all just reacting the same way we did the first time?
Jul 21, 2011
Jul 21, 2011 at 5:49 AM UTC
is like an airport terminal;
where everyone is waiting and no one is going anywhere.
Where the only thing people can tell you is
that your problems will be solved in
ten minutes.
(The amount of time that is short enough to
keep you waiting
and long enough to
make you insane)
The number that actually means: I have no ******* clue.
Airports are made to be passed through
while the people are still bubbling with anticipation.
But if you stay long enough
you beginning seeing through your peripheral vision.
And we all end up being
the last bag on the baggage claim
going
round
and
round
on the conveyer belt.
Searching for our owners.
At some point we are each
the pushy New Yorker
the silent blue-eyed six year old, wandering alone.
the child singing a song without caring who is listening.
We are all trapped in the unaccompanied minors waiting room
without a guide
in the trust of people, before today we had never laid eyes on
and to them we are simply bodies
needing to be moved, shipped, transported
on some conveyor belt to our next destination
we might as well be the luggage we pack our lives into.
Jun 26, 2011
Jun 26, 2011 at 6:05 PM UTC
The preschool was adjacent to the church
and I would whisper as we grew closer to the sanctuary.
I would hold my mom’s hand, tightly
and peak between the heavy double doors.
When she would let go, I would run down the aisle, the light shining through the tall blue stained glass windows.
I would count the pews in my peripheral vision.
I remember being too scared to go up all the steps of the alter.
I remember a three year old version of myself
staring wide-eyed into the blue light.
Jun 21, 2011
Jun 21, 2011 at 1:12 PM UTC
I'm done writing poems about you.
I don't want to rewrite them.
I just want to put them in a cardboard box
put your name on the side in thick sharpie
and push it to the back of my closet
and move on
and forget.
Eventually, be happy with what happened with us.
But not right now.
Not at this moment
because it tastes bitter.
and I'm remembering things that make me feel empty.
Jun 5, 2011
Jun 5, 2011 at 1:04 PM UTC
Helen.
Tell me about Turkey. Mustafakemalpasa. Bursa. Canakkale. Bandirma. 1973. Tell me about your insane exchange family: Ilhan, Sennur, Ahmet, and Canur. Falling for the family friend, Necdet—who died six short years later. Swimming in the Sea of Marmara. That infamous yellow bikini. 110 in the shade. Smelling the drying tobacco. Learning how to read the Koran. Tell me please, Helen.
Jun 5, 2011
Jun 5, 2011 at 12:56 PM UTC
She was wearing a purple sweater
His red headphones were swinging around his neck.
I hadn't spoken to her in years.
All we had in common was preschool playgrounds and chalk handprints.
Teaching me how to roll my rrrrr's.
It was funny.
seeing her like that
under the arm of a boy.
It was a context which neither of us probably thought we would be in.
Before all we knew was floral dresses, tricycles and growing lima beans.
Look at us Rosella.
Jun 2, 2011
Jun 2, 2011 at 6:39 PM UTC
Maybe it was the fact that you only knew broken English
And that you cried when all your tongue could only come up with blunt Norwegian
Did you cry when all the other first graders thought you were stupid, grandfather?
Was it that which drew you inwards to the growing child
And the growing misunderstanding of communication.
The barrier between elementary school tongues and accents is a large casme in your world.
Was it the marines, the war, the things you saw
that rationed you
Into the secluded soul that you became?
The distant, angry man, husband and father
Who drove cars far away from home
And than raged when you made it home on the weekend.
Was it that which made my father different?
Made him paint the walls of his room black and break windows at seventeen?
The walls of that confining house had never heard yells that loud.
The front door had never been slammed that hard.
Friends' couches became more familiar family members.
Was it that which made him the eclectic artist, unconfident man, funny husband, and tentative father?
Who mentioned specific detailed taste without any context
Who refuses to be challenged
Socially inept, his daughter thought.
Slight asburgers, she thought.
Ungrateful! Selfish! Attitude stricken! He retaliated.
How the **** was he supposed to react?
He never mentioned how much he loved her,
How much she changes his life.
Was it that made her the way she is?
She began becoming familiar with wine bottles and ***** that wasn't chased.
She drank to forget sometimes
She drank to not worry.
She'd say **** more often
And in the rooms of her best friends,
She'd laugh at her circumstances.
Than all she'd say was,
**** THEM ALL*
And sipped until the bottom of the bottle was her best friend.
May 29, 2011
May 29, 2011 at 1:52 PM UTC
I look at them and see their happiness
And in my mind the comparisons are already being drawn up.
Their delight in the late night trysts and flirtatious conversations make my thoughtful drawn out ones seem dimmer, darker and less than their experiences.
It hit me.
The insignificance of my relationship with him.
I observe my friend,
Return sweaty and crumpled,
Her shirt and skirt inside out.
She was holding her pink satin bra in her left hand.
She could barely communicate the thrills she had just experienced.
How can I compare?
The senior boys seem to line up
Out the classroom, begging from behind the hallpass, to have them run away and leave the darkness of Mary Shelley, for their arms and lips.
I find that the silence is growing in me
Like the idea of insignificance has taken root in my mind
And it's fruits are envy
Which I cannot leave to rot.
May 24, 2011
May 24, 2011 at 9:40 PM UTC