I sit at a two-top by myself
by the bar. I draw on the back
of a bill with a cheap pen I found
clicked in a foam cup upstairs.
I draw flat cars, flat poles,
flat humans. I give them swirl
hair and no fists.
They are all alike.
The bartender comes over and tells
me that the bar is closed. I hold
my left hand up to him and draw
the sky. I fill it with carbon pink stars
and coffee nebulae. Saturn's rings
are made of cornbread crumbs.

I blow a straw paper comet across the galaxy.

Like an outcasted stoop kid,
I sat glass-backed, bar-assed ten
feet away from the main streets
waiting.      Waiting
for some leaves to fall off treewires.
I waited for inspiration in the bitter
November chill biting at my ankles.
And I got funny looks from football
cap colleagues on this dressed-down
Thursday. The trees were practically
naked. Scarce blossoms and partridge
leaves crisped by the stagnant air.

The door'srustedhinges-aircrack-
waking ends a four hour sleep
short. I found out she was a lesbian,
and allergic to ****.

My mouth tastes like plain Pixy Stix
and I can only swallow in short bursts
like a camera or pool water over-
whelming the filter hole. It's like
untreated brine that I'm swimming
around in, ******* in, trying to sweeten
it with my natural body oils,
but it's not working

because my pool is also a lesbian,
and allergic to ****.

She intertwined her thick fingers
behind both shelves of the medicine
cabinet and embraced them clamorously
into the sink.

I.

Maybelline, Rimmel, and Revlon
now spotted with flakes of dried toothpaste
and ****** hair.

Just.

Her hands dove wrist deep into the pool
of glamor and acceptance before her
and emerged with scarlet lipstick.

Want.

She uncapped and carefully ran it across
her stiffened lips, accidentally coloring
her skin and the corners of her open mouth.

To.

She mashed a makeup brush into a jar
of powdered blush and swept it over
her cheekbones like a blood red sunset
overtaking a mountain.

Be.

With black tears running down her face
and staining her white shirt,
she reapplied her mascara.


**Beautiful.

I may not know how to hold
my liquor or change a flat tire.
I don't know how to throw
a spiral, so I'll just chalk it up
to magic laces.

I have no idea how jet planes
work or how to solve equations.
I'm not so strong, and I know I'd
lose in a fight against
any one of your exes.

I'm afraid of spiders, bees
and grizzly bears, thrill rides,
ocean tides, and one day
dying alone. Hell, I'm scared
for next week.

I do know how to sew the holes
in your favorite pair of jeans.
I can make you some hot cocoa
because you can't stand coffee's
taste.

I know how AV cables work
and how to play Donkey Kong.
I'd rather fight with words
than fists but still, I'd prefer
to avoid conflict.

I'm not afraid of going broke,
disease or dying young,
holding hands on your grandma's
couch, or staying up too late.
I've got this life figured out

on a napkin in my car.
You don't have to be jacked,
high, popular, cool or rebellious,
angry, tough, or accepted
to live.

I'm not expecting to race
over grass and gravel to greet
you with an umbrella today.
I'm not expecting to fight
you for blankets and bedsheets
if we sleep together tonight.
I'm not expecting to wake
you with a kiss or caress
if we open our eyes tomorrow.

Write everyday.
Write everyday no matter what.
Write even at a loss for words.
Write down the sounds.

I make notes of the plane crashes
I've never heard, the brook trout
that never shook pond water
onto the brittle grass when I didn't
catch it, or the thunder cup coil
I keep kneeing trying to give the overcast
over the mountain something to compete
with.

And I'm not sorry.
       I'm not.      I'm not sorry that my
reborn Christian best    friend    has   seen the    light,
and I still scoff when people pray over potatoes.
And I only believe in plastic Polaroid postcards
from last decade timestamped in the white space
with Bic black ink.
I'm not sorry for that.

And truth is, I've never washed this black shirt;
just hung it hoping that moths' would ****
the sweat spots and leave
the fabric.

I clenched the gold cap beneath
my ring finger from the glass green
bottle occupying my lips driving
down the Marsh Creek bridge.
I wanted to relate / to be relatable /
relative to the sedans, and seatbelts
too tight to breathe, passing me.

At the end of the bridge, where there was no chance
of drowning and the road color changed, I parked
in the driveway of a wooden house. Its blinds
were up, shades pulled apart with two hands
like gas station freezer doors, leaving them
vulnerable to the hiss of semi truck tractor
trailer high beams slicing through fifty +
raindrops per second going a few miles shy
of sixty-five, yet the people inside moved so freely.
I  sat Indian-style—a term I learned at four
then learned it to be racist at fourteen—
in their driveway, and ate the gravel
they walked on trying to taste security
because all I'd had in the last few hours
were plates of refried fear.

Fear of audit, of my teeth breaking off,
and of ending up like Eric Garner
when I heard that wailing
Voice of Justice
coming for me in the distance.

I'm studying real poets.

Shelley, Sandburg,
Frost, and Wordsworth.
Coleridge, Blake,
and William Butler Yeats.

Do you know why they're
considered real poets?

Because they made art,
not hashtag trends.
Wrote from Experience
with black quill pens.
Sure, they got high,
but wrote on instinct.
And The Road Not Taken doesn't
mean what you think.
They wrote about about life
and the world that they heard,
not ******* in the margins
of Microsoft Word.

I sat beneath a silver maple split
in two, yet still growing.
Dead leaves and nestlings
chirping like quick fire sirens
settled in the vein-like branches
above. The maple's cracked
canyon bark was dotted
with yellow lichens like distant
city lights.

I pushed aside a plastic box
of plastic-backed thumbtacks,
a half-roll of Scotch tape,
and a paperclipped stack
of edited verse to write
a letter to you.
It went something like this:

Dear Audrey,
     No, that's too informal.
     Just her first name would imply
     our friendship didn't mean anything.
                     What about
Dear Mrs. Barber?
     Way too formal. Like, am I going
     to follow it with "can Billy come out
     to play," or "I'm sorry I threw snowballs
     at the side of your house," or "I apologize
     for skipping your class to pop Tums
     in the nurse's office."
                     Maybe
Dear Audrey Barber.
     Something about the sounds
     doesn't feel right. The Ds and Bs
     hit the eardrum weird, like marsh-
     mallows or caramel toffee.
     They're just too thick.
Dear Audrey Sofield Barber,
          There we go.
     It's been a pleasure knowing you this past year
     or so. In a way, I regret being there for the box-
     moving and the computer troubleshooting,
     but not for the sidewalk shoveling or book editing.
     Or driving you to Elmira Corning Airport to pick
     up your daughter. I'm an English writing tutor here—.

     Never mind. How's your book doing? I'm sure it's a hit.
     Enjoy Hawaii.
Sincerely,
     C. S. Cizek (Christopher)
    
P. S. I plan to purchase "Wellsboro Roots" over the summer
         and relive our conversations in Wellsboro over coffee
         and cheap sugar.

Thank you for the honor.

Funny, isn't it?
That a woman no more than a knee-high coffee table and a few copies
of National Geographic away from me
is holding a cell phone in one hand
and an apple in the other.
One will eventually **** her,
and the other will make sure a doctor
isn't around when it happens.

Shut the **** up.**
It's hard dating anyone,
and *a poet's no different.

I write poetry, drink coffee,
talk art, dig cinema,
wear t-shirts without graphics,
t-shirts without tags,
and screen-print my to-do lists
on everything.
I say all this as I blow-dry
the temporary tattoo on my wrist.

On warm nights like this, streetlights
dot the sidewalks thick like map markers.
The screeching of tires mixes with applause coming
from the church. The breeze pushes my hair like a broom
in the deli I used to work at. Croutons and capicola
don't taste as good forgotten beneath the stove.
A bike light dances beneath the brush and teenagers
hold hands like chain-link.
Doors on either side of me catch carpets and don't close
like textbooks during finals week.

They were just poems.
Took me like five minutes.*

Yeah, but did you read them?
Do you understand how many
words are beneath the ones you saw
on the page?

My right thumb dove from my pitcher
into a man's water glass, soaking his napkin
and place mat. He pulled away from his mug
of Labatt Blue, lips curling the caramel color
back past his picket fence teeth. Like his wife's
diamond ring, she was turned away.
Her face was illuminated by her phone.
Sharon's back with Tom?

Shoot me.

He slid his chair back, legs scraping
the floorboards like a car accident. He stood
a decent four inches taller than me.
Chevrolet was printed across his faded
t-shirt, and his boots hit the floor like mallets
when he stepped. The pitcher in my grip shook
like the Titanic capsizing. This man was the iceberg;
**I was the captain panicking behind the wheel.

Three days until I leave home for Lycoming.
Three years until I leave Lycoming forever,
but it will never leave me.

I've packed away clothes, textbooks, my laptop,
chargers, and two skateboard decks.
But I still can't find my television cable.

Microwave, ballpoint pens, notebooks,
soap, shampoo, posters, contacts,
a rug, and a love seat for two or three.

Everything I need is clustered in the corner
of the living room, weighing on the 20th
century hardwood floorboards.

I only left my journal out.
I still have a few things to remember
before all the evergreens turn to brick buildings.

Like her husband, Claire's wineglass
left rings on the table. Her coarse
hair stuck to her thin, oxblood lips.
She found time to breathe in between
sips and dry coughs brought on by her friend,
John, smoking on the couch. He put his Pall Malls
out on the armrest like Dalmatians. Her sister
lay in a red wine carpet stain counting
the pennies behind John's feet.
Claire hid behind a fruit bowl;
oranges with skin far tighter than hers.
*Oranges her husband would've been glad to ****.

I hope you'll find me
          sitting on the edge
                  of a dash where
                                   the line
breaks.

Clenched teeth taste weak as they hold back the truth,
and each second wasted burns more than any mouth washed out,
but it’s worth it. “*******, Mom,” is what she says
as a sting of regret coated her tongue like cough syrup. She never holds back.
“I hope you ******* die.”
Liquid metal and salt fills her mouth to keep her quiet.
“You’ve got nothing to show for your life; that’s why Dad left.”
A heat is burning her tongue,
and leaves behind the painful taste of rubber,
like the marks her father left on the driveway.

Love is like an ice cube.
We hold onto it until
it gets too cold. Lucky
for us, I made room
in the freezer beside
TV dinners and a miniature
us holding hands atop
a slice of wedding cake.

I bent my toes over the tub
like talons on a sunbaked branch
and clenched the curtain
in my gloved hands.

I sprayed Tilex on a scouring
pad and scrubbed the black mold
riddling the ceiling and caulked
edges of the shower like leprosy.

My lungs filled with nitrogen,
oxygen, and argon as well as
sodium hypochlorite and hydroxide,
spores, and mycotoxins.

I staggered backwards, trying
to find solid ground but found
only a dazed, curtain-wrapped
fall to the cold linoleum below.

He knelt down beside the nightstand
and gathered cigarettes smoked down
to the filters in his growing hands.
Loose ash stained his palms  
as he moved the butts to one hand
and slid a coffee cup closer with the other.
He stood up—his eyes barely met
the drawers' brass handles—and placed
the makeshift ashtray on top.

He gave me a pen and paper
and told me to write. I pressed
the pen down and watched it
bleed blue. He clutched my wrist
and drew a box no bigger
than a matchstick. Write.
I was struck up more like lightening
than an intelligent conversation.
This sliver of a sliver of tree pulp
was my canvas, but I made do.

My dad
taped my first steps
on VHS. I took
my hands from the table and walked
to him.

The tape aged with me.
Cheering and static
muffled my excited squeals.

I know
I’ll grip the camera one day
and film my dad folding
his hands on the
table.

She leaned against a telephone pole
grounded in searing concrete. Her white
dress blew in the balmy breeze like
balcony curtains. Her Merlot lips
and azure lashes popped against
her skin. She wore a citrus perfume
to garnish every hip swing and shoulder
roll with a tropical accent. Like a tambourine,
the silver bangles chimed on her left wrist
with every footstep.
Her heels sunk in the veiny tar patches
that criss-crossed each parking space
several times over.

We played H.O.R.S.E. with Mountain
Dew cans last night, but sat more
on the bench than the sidelines.
Wiregrass crept through the faulted
court in lines. Lines like bike spokes,
like greasy dreadlocks, like power
lines. Enough **** left to last
the rest of the game? Enough
till "E," 'til we're empty?
Mountain Dew foul shots bank in
and lay on the court until tomorrow
night's game.

Words don't sound as good after midnight.
There's nothing to say when no one's up
to hear you. Stand on a bench
in the park at one o'clock and preach to trees,
press your nose against a store window
and scream at shopping carts, or sit in a gas station
and mutter to the lottery machine.
Pass the time 'til daybreak.

Is it my counter-counterclockwise
mind wasting time? Elbows
on the dining table pulling my angel
hair into grid-like times tables.
I’m invested in this non-conversation
table. Ich liebe dich, mein Freund.
I’ve got commitment issues and four-ply
tissues for when my eye lashes start
peeling apart. My grandpa died in 2005
and I’m all but over it. I’m holding
his kite string, but the reel is almost done,
like VHS tapes rewound then fast-forwarded
to the good times. Power Ranger birthday
and everyone’s wearing dunce caps
with elastic chin straps ‘til they snap.
Snap! Snap! Snap me back to three-years-old,
and I’m singing in a Robin costume
‘cause I knew I’d always be second best.
I had an identity crisis around fourteen,
so I stopped buying sunglasses
because I found myself in other
peoples’ shadows. But now the only shadows
they’re casting are the ones from their headstones
and from the fields of flowers cradling
them like they once cradled me.

Fast-forward, I’m genuflecting in gym shorts
before myself in a mirror smudged with plum
felt. And I seem small compared to my life
spelled out in Expo marker markings.

I promised Nick I'd take him out
of Pennsylvania, away from evergreen
trees and our troubles. My car leaked carbon
monoxide, but never enough to ****
us. Where we lived, things never changed.
Two out of three stores open on Main Street,
two gas stations where people paid $3.64
a gallon just to leave, a grocery store
that never settled on a name, and a police
force with histories no cleaner
than their patrol cars. If you've taken Route 6
through, you've seen too much. We dreamt
of Lady Liberty raising her torch to the sunset
in defense of the Empire State, or simply to pluck
it like a musician playing for pennies
near Strawberry Fields from the sky.
The Big Apple, where people make art instead
of excuses and the brightest lights aren't fixed
atop police cars.

Years have passed since our dreams died in '13.
We're stationed at desks in different hemispheres
for different reasons. All he has left are his lonesome
thoughts and all I have are mine. It won't be long
before my pen becomes a serpent and strangles
me in my sleep or my butterscotch disks turn
to cyanide. I'll always hold steadfastly
to our dreams underground.

Nick, I promise you that one day, we'll make
it to New York.

A while back, Nick and I sat
side by side
in split-back forest lawn chairs.
Huff and huff
the porch's coat of scarlet stain,
talking like
existential cab drivers.
Legs on legs
crossed like war trenches or
window blinds
or a cold zipper's cold teeth.
Life or death.
More life on rye, Swiss cheese.
Holey talk of Jesus Christ.
Cross the cross
and hope to die; I know we will.
For now, though,
skip small to get to big talk.
Cursive hand
separates notes and throws out
the *******,
but everything at that age was *******.
Challenger
never blew up, Dillinger
never robbed,
we never dissected life
to see its
uncertain pancreas.
We're kids but can't act like it.
Qualms with calm,
and clever wordplay plays footsies
with my thoughts.
My stale bread secrets take up
too much space.

—For Téa Page

That was Téa’s window—third floor,
the one with the burnt-
sienna box of skeletal moss-
roses dangling over the side,
a cloth curtain tacked open,
and a padded chair—royal
blue against the white drywall.
She said she used to watch
Coudersport traffic tumble dry
on low past Charles Cole,
quickly sketching sedans
and minivans as they left the frame.

She told me all this at a high-school
basketball game, beneath a cork
board plastered with black-and-white
portraits of track girls with crochet
hooks for collarbones.

She showed me the healing scars
where she dug Swingline staples
into her ankle, like mismatched
thread in a worn blanket.
Téa was the thread.
Her parents wove her in
and out of psych wards, therapists’
notes, and Prozac prescription carbon
copies. Over: Dad snapping peanut necks in a bar somewhere.
    Under: Mom Keystone-soaked on the couch.
                    Over back to that third-floor window:
the only place Téa felt at home,
though I’ve never seen it—
I never even gave her my name.

8:55 A.M.
Wednesday,
December 3, 2014

Eyes dry, stagnant like a box fan
in a windowless room in summer.
Del Monte plastic blades—black
on the serrated side—dice rotting
pizza tomato trash air.

Stomach like a battery acid pond.
Flannel, Dockers, hair slicked
tight like road signs, tossing oyster
crackers to acid ducks. The sky's
on fire.

Clouds textured like *******
and never-ending like Escher.

Jet planes carry ***** comatose
patients into the sun to burn
out like a light bulb
a few flickers of life gone.

Hands dry, faulted like missing
bathroom tiles at Exxon-Mobil/
Sunoco/Shell beneath the metal
sink where crabgrass sprouts
from the cracks like

cheap caulk from Second-Hand Hardware.
Bent nails, rusted patching trowels,
ants in the quick-dry drywall mix.

I'll never reach Nirvana.

A solar sunflower danced on her dashboard
and the lei on the rearview hit me like a snakebite.
Scented trees beneath my feet smelled like a flower shop
fire. Her seatbelt was knotted like her shoelaces
and her lemon lips kept me coming back.
Between us on the highway were CD cases and enough
loose change for a sweet tea. We turned off the radio
and listened to the roar of the wind through her cracked
windows. Her dress' hem flattened on her thighs
like the moon. Four hours to a truck stop with curios
and 75 cent ****** machines in the bathrooms.
Her doors creaked on their hinges as we danced
our way to the concrete.

She dug two tiny trenches in the loose dirt
near the porch steps and enclosed
them with pebble barricades.
Like discharged rounds, a rusted
grill rack seared the grass between them.
The Confederate flag that hung
from the gutter caught the wind and flicked
water onto the stairs and the Northern trench,
turning it thick like Union blood.

Blankets, pillows, a black dog, and a cell phone.
Facebook, Twitter, Vine, Gmail, and Instagram.
Shampoo, soap bar, toothbrush,
toothpaste, temperature, and time.
Shaving cream, razor, running water,
advertisements, sensitivity, precision, and cuts.
Burned tongue, empty stomach, loose tie,
missing shirt buttons, beating the clock,
wallet, briefcase, and car keys.
Ballpoint pens, scented trees, fast food wrappers,
loose change, lighters, citations, ***** clothes,
CDs, and napkins.
Red lights, pedestrians, homeless people,
newspapers, billboards, pets on leashes, sewer
grates, crosswalks, skyscrapers, and garbage.
Faxes, printers, memorandums, break room,
prestige, cubicles, customer service, paperweights,
filing cabinets, stocks, and corporate.
Wipers, streetlights, rain coats, dive bars,
and home.
Blankets, pillows, a black dog, and a cell phone.

Wireshell trash can sweep-brushed
by Fusion, Alero, Chrysler Something.
They’re filled to the brim like sepia-stained
skyscrapers with swivel chairs and water cooler
pow-wows. Boss’ talking fax machines
and projections for the second fiscal quarter,
flipping a stock EKG reading on its ***. We’re
all millionaires. All up like the NYSE at seven o’clock
in our living rooms watching the fireplace
playfully threaten our investments while CNN
sends money through the VCR slot. Cars, no
garbage trucks, cars, cars, scraping hubcaps off
the high sidewalks like beautiful harpsichords.
Neighbors. Suitcases and dresser drawers
packed tight with meat tape, paper towels,
and coffee mugs/fine China make heaped trash bags
seem obsolete. There’s no garbage here.
Downtown’s neon district makes enough
that they could afford a glowsign on every window,
every square inch of every lunch special, gallery opening,
or Salvation Army bell-ringer.

Forget New York,
we're the city that never sleeps.

I miss the way your fingertips
drew circles on my almond skin.
I miss wrapping your hair around
my finger like a phone cord
when I watched you sleep beside
me.

Now that I have your attention…

My issue’s not with the lost loves
but with the ones still holding on.
Because of you, pain is a cliché.
Human emotion has become
redundant. The only thing
that’s #depressing about
your life is how you’ve made
a conscious decision to relive
your “hells” constantly by making
them the focus of your poetry.

All I want is a stick-up light, so I can read at night,
between my bedpost and bedside whiteboard
beside the baseboard,
outlet occupied by a black power cord,
the bookshelf, both coffeemakers,
the power strip duct-taped to the cream brick wall,
the bush outside,
the sidewalks, the brick walks,
the burnt caramel steel fences separating Washington babble
from Lyco small talk.

With one touch,
I’m lying against the wall
on acrylic-painted stretched canvases,
photo booth strips, a brick and sky scene,
gouache and ink sketches, that Giant
receipt with teal pen in the margins,
and developed photos of storm
troopers, ****** microwaves,
and forklifts moving trash sofas
around from film class.

Every flower in a fenced
flowerbed only has a few
petals to pick from until
you're climbing up
the stem like an elevator
that can only jump floors
so many times before
it gets stuck on a chained
bench with a cinder block
back and a $1,000 bail.
Maybe after a few nights,
I'll spar with the cast iron
bars 'til one of them falls
like the petals from my thin
fingers to the sidewalk.

My mom tried to sweep
clean the cigarette burns on the armrest,
and turned the plastic-cracked
lampshade away from rare houseguests.
The arrow-shaped gap melted
at the middle and leaked down
the shade like a stopped-
up gutter. Climbing out her bedroom
window, she knelt on the rotten
mint shingles and tossed matted
maple leaves as indiscriminately
as rock salt onto the glassy sidewalk
drinking in the overhead halo
of Penelec Electric and pine needles.

Needles—

The red biohazard suitcase
in the dining room is packed
full for distribution
in a Philadelphian switchyard.

City of Brotherly Burning Barrels
and railroad-tie benches—
but not for dressing up suburban
meditation gardens, or housing
yellow jackets and half-melted
Army men. For sitting, sleeping,
and supplying calf splinters
for small talk along the Schuylkill
River, watching the cell lights
of Eastern State get swallowed
whole by the systematic tall grass,
one by one, thanking some blessed
something for their freedom
in the boxcars, their *** and Lucifer
matches, and each other.

I painted the bedposts and bedside whiteboard
beside the baseboard, the outlet occupied
by a power cord, the bookshelf, both coffeemakers,
the power strip duct-taped to the brick wall,
the bush outside, the sidewalks, the brick,
the steel fences separating traffic
babble from pedestrian small talk,
then filled the wall in, gave the oak posts
enough depth to hold up four coats,
a backpack, and a shoe lace, swirled
in the condoms and coffee rings
inside the microwave, sketched a Sears
Apple-Jack-colored record player plugged
in, turning dusted Beatles records
like the cosmos, like the snow, squirrel-
hair, and leather-leaf bush outside.
I masked off the concrete, the asphalt,
and construction yard sidewalks,
penciling dead mosquitoes in the cracks
and $2.39 Rock Salt Slush along the edges.
I measured the fence, so each stake hit
the vanishing point like cigarette butts
in cement cereal bowls of cat litter.

But I ran out of paint before I could fill
the mouths of motorist **** yous,
the car barks chasing dogs
to the chain-link guard rail,
doorbells and mailbox flags
being flipped up, pay phones
clashing on metal receivers,
church bells, footsteps,
some guy breathing,
and a red-light button Wait.

Maybe it’s for the best.

I sat a foot away and sketched her. I didn’t use pencils.
I drew her with words. I started with her cheekbones.
They were raised like hands eager to explain
what gradation does. Her mouth provided the answers
and moved like sketchbook pages in the wind.
I moved on to her eyes. They were like the Van Gogh palette
from which “Starry Night” was born.
The charcoal above them was like a ******
of crows at dusk. If she saw imperfection,
she could cover it up. She was the painter,
but also the canvas.

I propped my heels on a vinyl
trumpet case beside a Rubik's Cube
with mostly white squares. Steel hinges
and a combination latch
kept a midnight groove contained.
Last load's dryer sheets found
their way inside my backpack,
picking up character from uncapped
pens and highlighters.

I'm in Pittsburgh all the ******' time. Well, I used to be.**

I used to go bridge jumping,
lace ***** bungie jumping.
I had options, now it's Market St.
over the Susquehanna or the
long bar at the pub.
****! I miss the Steel City like
missed calls, not at all then all at once.
Stuck in Pepsi-Cola Central, Pennsylvania, in an armchair down the hall from my room flooded with pictures of lovely Pittsburgh. Single-pane windows come close to glass
skyscrapers. Kind of.

Not at all.

Sometimes on the way out of Giant,
I'll spend some time freeing change
from the receipt-paper
bindle in my coat pocket
for one two-twist mystery prize
from a Folz machine.

Two quarters:
Enough for a sapphire ring and a cheap
laugh while I juggle coffee-cream cartons,
a sack of December oranges, Certs,
cinnamon mouthwash, a dented can
of green beans 'cause it's cheaper,
red toothpicks, Ziploc bags, a barbecue
chicken TV dinner, Noxzema, a 32-case
of Poland Spring water, a Valentine's
Hallmark card and envelope, a bottle
of pink grapefruit Perrier,
two quick picks for Cash 5,
gluten-free potato chips, garlic salt,
some cumin for $2.82, and a copy
of Vogue.

I strap my groceries in the passenger seat,
and see them sitting straight up as I had,
childishly marveling at the lush
maple leaves washing the windshield
edges in green, leaving helicopters
and dew trails.

She and I watched slug trails
beneath mustard streetlights glisten
like Berger Lake.
Bright as the last cigarette my grandma snuffed out in a smokeless ash tray.
Bright as the first line of road flares that separated me from a burning Taurus.
Bright as the quarter my grandpa gave me for the Folz machine in the Sylvania.
And bright as the emerald ring I showed him.

I found the class fish wrapped in single-ply
tissue and pencil sharpener refuse,
her poinsettia-sunset scales picked clean,
gathered in a Styrofoam cup. Her coral
fins crumbled, leaving rough edges like split
chalk or hopscotch gravel. Her last ocean
was the cover of a Nat Geo from
1995. Easing my fingers
beneath the matchstick spine, I deftly walked
to my desk, and laid her on construction
paper. I casted her slivered ribcage
in glue before I poured the scales, hoping
she'd triumphantly flick some harmless fire
when she woke, but she just laid there, shining.

One story in two hundred pages,
or one in two stanzas of four lines each.

Every now and then,
I'll pop two quarters into Lucky
Lucky Me! for a plastic ring
and a cheap laugh
on my way out of Giant, juggling
cream cartons in both arms.

And I love
them beside me in the passenger
seat, sharing it like two children
that sit up straight just to marvel
in the maple branches washing
the windshield in green.

But then slouch back when law
firms and Wells Fargo flood
the forest floor, trapping
blue birds and black owls
in one-way glass cages,
so all they can do is look forward
back in on themselves slowly
splintering into subsidiaries.

Commuters and Armani suits
bounce their Starbucks cups
off each set of cell bars.
"Can you hear me now,"
2002 asks us, but no reply.

'Cause it's no good.
There's no use in communicating
with social butterflies
when their wings are folded
like the cardboard boxes
we're packing with paperbacks,
'cause we'd rather stack tabs
than physical photo albums.

The one on top with the burgundy
felt cover. Yeah, that one. Flip
three pages back to that picture
of us at prom in '96 with that faux
sapphire glistening on your hand
from the heat lamps overhead
and the disposable photo flash
we couldn't turn off.

Bleach out the blush wine in your sundress,
bleach the walnut from your hair, bleach the coffee outline from your teeth,
bleach the gray grout in the kitchen floor, bleach the teal sky.
Everything is pure,
*everything is nothing.