The mailman dropped a letter in our box
for Mrs. Tovia Durkan who has not lived

at our address for forty four years
and is now buried in a small cemetery

surrounded by a black wrought
iron fence and glorious mums,

we are now the caretakers of
a letter sent to a Jewish widow

leaving us to feel responsible
to attend the Bat Mitzvah of

12-year-old Sophie Bravermann;
do we bring a gift?

My heart pounds like thunder.
Your eyes shine like lightning.
We crash together.
There’s a storm inside of me.

The sound is muffled,
The flashes slowing.
We’re diminishing now.
You brewed a hurricane inside of me.

The birds are out,
Chirping, whirling.
The sun is shining.
It’s over.

And you’re nowhere to be found.

- kmh

Remembering a ghost.
A shadow waits in a room now.
While the hollow body walks.
But the body and the shadow,
Remember a ghost they'd rather be.
He died and they're the leftovers.
That ghost really lived.

I don’t want to be present
when any child figures out

that much of our world
has descended into

dead toads atop a white pillow
where those children must lay their heads

to sleep at night for
the next eight decades.

how often I wish for 91 Brunswick Ave
compressed together in a claw foot,
your flesh my home
cakes baked in too shallow pans
I forget what song was playing when
you told me you loved me.

how often I wish for the freeway between
Cocoa Beach and Orlando,
a friendly chaperone asleep in the back
hands knotted thinking:
“this is ours”

how often I think of August bonfires
the terror of an international move
“you would be a day ahead of me for ten weeks”
I felt stronger than the 100-year-old ruins we were
standing in

how often I wish for The Standards,
High Line and East Village,
bacon cocktails and antiquated photobooths and
windswept harbour panoramas
my insubstantial voice begging
“don’t turn the red light off,
I need you to see where my bones shattered
and pierced my skin”