All dressed up in her mother’s cigarettes,
Which she has put on to impress the women on the sidewalk
Gossiping about someone’s dead husband.    
The way her knuckled fingers pinched the parched paper,
A string of smoke spreading in gray air,
Was inherited from her mother,
This along with her loneliness.
She never had a daughter to share it with;
A century’s tradition of absent intimacy and substitute truths ready
To cease when her lungs do
And not be missed.

I’ve played every game of hide-and-go-seek
In every crepuscular backyard
I’ve ever been offered and yet I still have hungry bones,
They crave public speaking and guitar solos and
A mossy bunker syruped in insurgent nighttime,
Yellow Dairy Queen drive-thru windows when it’s still not quite spring and
Attic card games that smell like quilts and old wood.

It has really always been fear-
Fear that the others wouldn’t see the execrable constellations of flies on the windowsill
Or the way the aurulent old glass panes warped the tree branches.
I had this doomish consciousness that it was my notice that animated these jewels,
I gave them souls that
Followed me forever, their gaunt and incomplete faces impressing that
I must remember them.

Am I supposed to want
To do more than just take it all in, how does everyone
Hold so fast onto the silk when it’s been
Sedated to such a slippery strand?
My grip tends to snap the thread extended by the
Way they talk to me, maybe if they gave me a rope.
As it is I prefer to
Synthesize the scenery into puffs of ***** smoke-
These desserts are grated from reality and so I
Must love reality, but I can’t eat it raw;
I see people’s sawdust centers as the
Cream they could become, I am far more deterred
By bitter tastes than the concept of having to wait for my predictions to ripen,
The fact that they never will is
Only a cynical estimation of mine that I hope will spoil as I age.
Spices are not lies, are not
Blandness masquerading as something so inconsistent with your vision that
You will lose sight of the road.
It is not just a question of
Going down easier, it’s just better
To boil your potatoes.
I hope to dispel a fear of my own, that
I’m some sort of addict, filling myself up with helium like some sort of
Basement-life pocket knife fix,
A recipe mixed to skew me into groggy selfishness that
I would anticipate as good faith and optimism, but my tendencies are erratic,
Dragging my body along to trace a healthy heart line, I suppose,
and with one foot in the door,
I can't quite say which side I'd rather be on.

Her mouth was carved
By a knife,
Now an open wound, all it does is
Bleed
Sour blood onto her starchy bed sheets,
Her friends are few and fleeting, unaware that her
Clicking Chiclet teeth saw the light of day
Long before they were meant to, how the ragged corners of her smile
Scab when she is still.

Sometimes they are dropped like pennies
On the sidewalk to be
Received by handsome strangers,
An ongoing exchange exemplified
In the little clay bowls besides the tip jar, reading
Take one, leave one.
I've known a few collectors, mostly
Nosy old men who spend stifling afternoons on their groaning porches
Eyeing passersby with
Greed-glazed curiosity and a pair of bifocals, and
Once my brother filled a whole book with all
The state quarters.
Change is heavy and we’re
All afraid we’ll end up with lumpy pockets so heavy
Our pants fall around our ankles so we
Spend it away in vending machines
That carry Coke when we want Pepsi, machines
So full that they spit back quarters.
I know there is no protocol
For that machine that offers nothing, its
Empty coils glaring, winking behind ***** glass but
Your pockets are just so full.

She is in the blue shadow of a city on the horizon,
the metronomal click of six inch heels, hypnotic on linoleum,
the reflection of one window in another,
the scoliosis of the trees in an unlit wood.
When the sun is setting, and each blade of grass casts a shadow against the others,
here the images are ready, like Velcro, to hold fast to a heart.

In the slumber of dead flies on an attic windowsill,
the cacophony of the contents of a garbage can spilled into the truck before your alarm,
the way the syrupy night covers the windows to make it seem the world beyond has ended,
there are words with which we amplify the beats of our hearts,
most especially when they are too soft for us to hear ourselves.

I’m outside and the air is so crisp it’s turned brittle
When I move, my hair cracks with electricity
As if with each step I take, I displace
And crinkle the wafer oxygen.
My hair, it is poised like a snapping electric halo,
And I think how many angels have also had feet
Which knew this frozen, frosty soil like mine do.
What a shame we could not have met and compared notes.
Above is a ceiling, nearer than people credit to be.
There is no navy shroud tonight,
Seasoned with the universe.
It is not even a black curtain,
But instead a piece of smoke fogged glass, graying.
Above the briery penthouses of the evergreen boundaries,
Against which the glass rests,
Is a blush of light, to the North, tattle of a city.
They call it light pollution, a lightening of the sky
Due to artificial, phosphorescent, perpetual pantomimes of noon: streetlights
And I see two electric halos,
One belonging to me
One the heavens,
And I think how funny that
Without the dry, horrid winter air,
or the residue of a wasteful city of men,
No halos would exist.

It was not weight or girth that made his presence heavy,
But a gravity.
He was like snow,
Out of the corner of my tiny eye,
Calm and silent and heavy, solemn.
Falling, too.
He was falling slowly.

His hands were in the pockets
Of his black jacket,
And I’d never known that to be
A mannerism of his,
Which meant he was acting.

Unfurling from him,
A long stream of steam, like the breath of a dragon.
I saw him steel willed,
Magma veined,
As powerful as I‘d always suspected,
Found hints of at the end of the fraying rope
He’d given me to hold onto.
I saw, scorching through the cracks in his skin,
Peeking through the edges of his eyes and reflecting in his glasses,
Something much bigger than he now looked,
And I released my own gray air into the winter.
The icy sidewalk burned on through the soles of my tennis shoes.