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.

If you think this might be about you, please, don't stop reading.
Though I might not know you yet I have probably encountered you before.
We probably avoided colliding but secretly we wanted to. Maybe you are one of the boys on the bus who, for a sixteenth of a second makes my heart pound and my fingertips go numb, hoping that you'd notice me.

I want you to play your tongue across the piano keys of my teeth.
I want us to sing the themes of Pucchini operas while we make rainy Sunday pancakes.
I want to walk with you through the vineyards of your homeland.
Let me take the weight of your world and put it somewhere beneath my shoulders,
for me to carry with me.
I will never use us in the past tense.
We will never look sad in photographs
and our airmail correspondances will be kept in floral boxes and hidden
for one of our daughters to discover.
Our love will be in the brushstrokes of Signac and Monet.

We will discover that the island of Hawaii
is like the excess emotions of the world
that have congealed out of the earth
to be comforted by the rocking waves.
The sunsets hearts of the people will welcome us.
On the black earth
they walk
their hands filled with sun bleached coral stones.
And they spell out messages and write out the names of the ones they love
so even God can read what's in their hearts.

And when the world takes you from me
which it undoubtably will
I will scatter your ashes in the places we have walked.
along the vineyard trails
and the mountain peaks
and in the deepest oceans we crossed for one another
I will let go of you
let you leave my hands on the winds that rush through Death Valley
while I drive along the same highway
that we carved together.
And I will return to the island of Hawaii
carrying white stones to write out your name
for God to read.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Things were just on the other side of the fence.
the perspective of the other side of the bus
he walked out the door and she was left with her thoughts
the sun lit up realization as it fell upon my face
focus on my reflection and let everything beyond blur
her body is slowly giving up on her
cold sandbox love
little Hannah drawing on the walls with green and red crayon
purple marker masterpieces of a two and a half year old
the economy falls,,,,into the hand of a homeless man screaming "Away Spirit" but we keep on walking
the ***** you chased with coca-cola at your best friends birthday party made you see how controlled you were with a blank mind and a laughing mouth, how you seemed to float along down the skinny hallway but somehow slam the door. the opposite of the lightweights laying on the orange **** carpet.
telephone pole shadows.
those dull blue eyes
biting lips till they bleed to relieve the pent up anxiety
not understanding how people can be satisfied and contented with the monotonous routines.

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.

Pay phone change
48 hour flights
waiting up to hear your voice
monastery bells tolling at dusk
words that are crisp upon the air
war stories told many times over
the blur of life on the other side of the window
my cold hands
kohl rimmed eyes
light through blue stained glass
lazy lovers
nostalgic chord progressions
that dress that you never wore
watery footprints on the pavement
the abandoned shoes on the telephone wire
the marquees we'll never remember
rose-tipped clouds
the way he looked at her, as if it were the first time
silhouetted palm trees
and thoughts
too small to be voiced

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.

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.

in the shutter of my camera.
in all the worn holes in my cardigans.
in the smell of your cooking.
in the sound of cutting strawberries.
in the turning pages of all the anthologies.
in the broken windows.
in the crumbled sheets.
in all the songs I hear.
in the place where you used to sleep.

I knew nothing of the terror on that september day till i heard about the prolonged suffering of all those souls who knew that entering those two burning towers would be a catalyst in their lives.
I, who in this moment represent all of those innocent souls who have been forced to remain innocent while our media focuses more on the style of the hour than the suffering of those who have risked their lives for our protection.
Did I know, that the black ashes of those towers were polluting the hearts and lungs of those firefighters and search and rescue men and women.
Did I know?
Because the issue has refused to be discussed.
Imagine if those men and women chose to stand, dumbfounded in the ash covered streets of New York City.
Imagine,  if we let the towers burn and sacrificed thousands of other innocent souls.
I did not imagine until I stood a matter of a feet from were the Towers once fell.
Where those men and women breathed in the black ash on the day they saved so many and slowly killed themselves.
Strength is not shown in the numbers running from the scene but those who run towards the terror.
They are never crazy or suicidal.
They deserve our gratitude,
and our priority.

I was frightened by familiarity.
I assumed that a hometown was just a cage to be broken out of.
The freeways burned like veins into my forearms.
The lights of distant cities lighting up my being.
I ran
from your open arms and wide eyes
to find nothing but empty bus terminals and books that held no solace for me any longer.
My resolution was to run harder and father away
from those who knew me best
because they had also seen my vulnerability.
From there I initiated fresh starts
but I built false foundations in every new beginning.
I kept chasing that horizon which had long marked the boundaries of my existence.
I was running from the possibility of familiarity
of settling,
of the prospect of someone knowing every detail about me.
I was frightened that once they knew,
they would run to the opposite horizon.
I was mistaken.
I never felt the dawn of your eyes until I felt the dusk of missing them.
I found that there is a difference between cage-bars and open arms
and that I couldn't run any longer.