There’s a gentle hum in my ears at all times.
Sometimes it’s ringing, calling out to me to
take action—
do something with my day—
and other times it’s smooth, in waves,
rocking me to sleep like I’m by the shore,
about a hundred feet out to sea, and the water
is breathing into me, humbling me.

When the nervous ticks come, and my body starts to
shake
break
wake,
I fight to get back to shore.
I raise my hand up towards the sun, curving it over the cloud, and
scooping up the last bit of air that I can
because I know I’m going down.

And then I’m on the couch and he’s making me laugh,
And I feel myself pushing the bad feelings down.
They’re like a sinking rock that I accidently dropped,
I didn’t expect it to fall so fast,
but now that it’s gone, I’m starting to
relax, breathe in, then out.
Never knew why I kept the rock in my pocket, thought
it was just something I was meant to keep
locked close to me, so that it couldn’t hurt me
when I lost sight of it.
But I watched the rock slip away from my grip,
my fingers reached
instinct
but his arm around my shoulder
reeled me back.
I imagined my pebble, worn and dark,
smacking the shells of an undersea pavement,
and staying there
while I swam away.

He pulls me in towards him,
skin against skin,
and the tide tries to pull my feet back,
but he makes the world raise a white flag for me.
Our mast is stronger, catches the wind in flight,
grips the curve of the wave just as it’s galloping forward,
and we glide towards shore, like clouds in the sky.

I opened a door. I unleashed the lock. The tension

inside is already gone.

Turn the key, feel it be

free.

Engage the new light, feel it

unwind.

It has forgotten how it feels to be outside.



You’ve been walking barefoot in a street speckled

with snow, like salt and pepper on an egg,

sunny side up with toast.

It’s easier to walk this way—scarred and frozen,

you say, you say,

as you pull the scarf tighter around your

neck,

button each button again and again.

The freeze creeps up your uncovered legs,

tickling each hair, each bone, each cellular day.

It lights them up before cutting them down.

The trees lay bare, they lay and they

lay.



But the snow is shivering into a river,

and you’re finding the road is shy and bitter.

You open an old door, forgiving the lock. The tension

from outside is already gone.

Turn the key, feel it be

free.

You twinkle your toes, and feel them

unwind.

They have forgotten how it feels

to come inside.

I am desperately trying to ease my way back into solace,
caressing her name as I smear paint across my eyelids.
She floats off the tongue like a silhouette dancing against the wall,
feathery and light, a fairy that can’t be caught.
I coo at her resemblance to the girl in the mirror.
She looks so good, I wonder where she’s been.

Her eyes sing “found, I’ve been found” but
I can only see that home when I close my eyes.
The mascara stained eyelashes flap against my cheeks,
And the butterfly finally escapes.
I feel her slide down the bridge of my nose,
Gliding on the curves of my collar bones,
bouncing off of my shoulders into the air.

If I open my eyes then the silence will come,
The little girl inside me will have run
back to Neverland, and I need to chase after her.
I can watch her fly away if I stay this way, so I’ll know how
to follow her later, emulate her flight path
between the tightly packed houses in the west district
and the turns and curls of royal palaces.

I focus closely and memorize her route,
down to the star map and ballet flats,
and carefully, wearily, I open my eyes to sunrise outside.
There is a new day to be lived through, but I do not belong.
There is a song to be sung elsewhere, but when do I run?

they told me not to sip too much from the solo cups
if I didn’t want to get ***** tonight.
the feminist issue here is not keeping up
but keeping low, keeping unnoticed,
staying as safe as that moldy orange in the Safeway,
never gonna get plucked up and ***** that way.

they told me not to indulge my senses and enhance my intoxication
levels at risk of decreasing my chances of
survival against a ******
attacking me.

they told me I feel like I need to keep up with the guys with my drinks,
match my stack of cups to theirs, and I just think
that’s *******, I just want to drink my ****** beer,
but they said that’s how I’ll get *****.

well maybe I binge on a lot of bad habits.
I pile them up on the CVS counter like a checklist of things not to do,
smoke, spend too much money and time on ebay bidding on
vintage rings and things I’ll never need, eat a row of oreos out of
my roomate’s care package, and drink too much at the occasional
party where I fraternize with the males from planet greek,
but does that make me guilty for getting *****?

today I woke up feeling like a damaged cause,
like a present that fell out of the back door of a UPS truck going
75 miles per hour on the highway in East Tennessee
and I never got to my destination.
should I have buckled my seat belt tighter?

society makes me feel crazy for thinking I can try to prevent
a violent act of maddening hate against a woman’s body,
or maybe a man’s, let’s not discriminate,
brought on by alcohol, late night musing, and punch bowl brewing.
maybe they should tell the rapists to keep their pants zipped
and their ***** to themselves unless they are requested.
keep your hands in your pastel short pockets and
let me go on with my business of being a proud, righteous woman.

It is senseless, it is wreckless,
It is ****** up nonetheless that
There is still nothing to be said for your death
They’ve arrested two guys for selling drugs
But what’s that got to do with what’s above
We need to remember you for your life, not your death, Marianne
But that’s all I seem to know you for. And that’s just not fair.
It is hopeless, it is sadness
That has come around to haunt us
In these moments, in these days, after you fell
From a window, so senseless
Did you even know you were falling?
Did you know that you were dying?
Did you know that anyone else was awake, across the way,
With her window open, at 4 am, early that Saturday,
And she heard you scream,
She heard you fly,
she heard that sonic boom rush that comes when life leaves us,
and rushes you off to another place
where you just watch over us
and I wonder if you saw
how nothing happened for a moment.
Fifteen moments, fifteen minutes, that there was silence
And I stood there looking out my window
Wondering where was the sense in this world to guide us down that street,
Where were the people rushing down to the courtyard, running on the concrete,
Searching for your face, for your familiar body, for you to be okay.
There was nothing.
For fifteen moments, fifteen minutes, there was silence.
And then they started coming.
And I stood there and watched as sirens and lights and cars, they all flashed,
They all came in a flash and ran around in a flash and blinded me with a flash
That didn’t leave me that whole weekend.
I don’t like sirens anymore. They mean someone’s been hurt.
Like you were, Marianne.
I heard a glass shatter and a cryptic scream, and I ran to my window to see
It sounded like someone had been hit by a car, slam, crash, break
With reality, break with life, break away from the lights from the sirens that only come when it’s too late,
but there were no cars on the street, not that I could see. I couldn’t see any accidents, at least not in front of me.
Should I have called? Should I have said something?
Here I am proving the bystander theory that I learned all about
In that lecture last Tuesday.
You’re more likely to be helped if only one person sees you fall,
Instead of seventeen or fifty or a courtyard full of freshman
Still up watching tv getting high eating shrooms playing videogames
Whatever you wanna call it, whatever you wanna say you were doing
Was it that important?
And who am I to talk? I didn’t call anyone. I didn’t do anything.
But I’m writing you a poem, Marianne. If you can even call this a poem.
That’s what I’m doing. I’m trying to remember you.
I’m trying to know more about you.
Because I hate knowing you only for that second that you fell,
For that second you might’ve ****** yourself over and fallen out the window in Brewster Hall,
Because I know you were a great girl, you were smart and you were cool,
And I wish I could’ve known you for your life, instead of this death, so cruel
And where is the memorial? Where is the flag? Where is the announcement saying
We are here to remember
No **** no we aren’t. We are here to forget. That is what we do best,
As humans, we forget. We push it to the side, go on with our lives, because that’s
That’s how we cope. We don’t. We pretend it didn’t happen, that she didn’t fall by that bench.
A girl died ladies and gentlemen. And we know her for her death. And that is a fault we need to fix, a life we need to resurrect
Through memories and poetry and spoken word at events like this
I hope you hear this, Marianne, and know that girl who heard you fall
Hasn’t forgotten you and never will.
I’ll be okay, but I’m not who matters. It’s the girl from Taiwan
Who loved to play soccer and greet people with a smile,
It’s the girl who loved her boyfriend, and was in love with this school,
So in love with the place she never even had to visit
To know she wanted to come here,
And this is what she gets.
Death. She came here for that American dream, and she got it
For almost a year. Not even. It’s terrible.
So here’s to you, Marianne. Rest in peace. Sorry about the way we met.

There was heat lightning as I walked back home that night.
it was Saturday, or rather, Sunday,
5 am, still dark
when I got his text and I wondered this: how far can two strangers go?

how quick can two fall in Love,
and just how quick does it take
for ignorance to come on?
Love is not Love anymore.

but I’ll admit to missing this,
only to you, my reader:
I do sometimes miss the sight of my once lover
walking towards our table with two cups of coffee in hand.
he hasn’t memorized my order yet, and I’m content with this.
it’s moving slowly, we’re just friends that happen
to spend a lot of time together, and share favorite movies,
and favorite songs, and could listen to a newly discovered old album
all the way through
just lying on his bed
and gazing at each other.

we could stare into the other’s eyes till we found our own reflection.
he was in me as much as I was in him.
Love is not love anymore
when I’ve left that part of me in upstate new york, in another land.

Love is being content.
but I am not content with myself
or my others that try to be significant,
like the one who sent that text,
hopeless, romantic, and misguided.
I am not in Love, reader,

not since him.

so when I got this text and he said that he could imagine us together,
holding hands, in a state beyond
nice, simple, naïve, simplistic
friendship,
I paused

stuck in my place,

for long enough that the lightning had a chance
to greet the storm.

the rain pummeled down, extraterrestrial,
and the bag of White Castle burgers I carried
disintegrated.

as the bag narrowed down in size, sliders plopping down onto the pavement
I kept running towards my home, trying to forget that our friendship was in question.

Love is not love anymore.
it scares me more than it should.
I’d rather let my seven dollars go to waste,
than give into love’s blind, bitter taste.

I’d rather my toms be pounded down into the pavement by the rain
and later spend three days drying in the back of my closet
and have the security guard stare at me, confused,
as the last of my sliders fall down onto the sidewalk outside his door.

“That’s a mess,” he says,
as if I didn’t know,
and he makes no move to help me clean it up,
so I choose not to reply to him.

It is not until my parents leave my brother and I to wander about the Musée d’Orsay

on our own tick tock desire and dollar,

where we take in the sunset and clock frame I recognize from a black and white photograph my mother took when she came

herself, and I almost trip over the rope that protects a Monet—

“Excusez-moi!” I almost scream—

that I am left to breathe in Paris at my own pace.



Perched on a stone bench high enough

that I have to awkwardly throw my body onto the slab

like I’m a sacrifice to the gods of love,

I chew on some ham pressed

between some lettuce and two halves of a baguette,

and I throw the breadcrumbs,

at first caught in my hair,

to the birds,

the ones who wander around the courtyard of the museum,

waiting for fools like me to feed them after viewing great art.



Some are gray with white tips

at the end of each feather, and others

have their heads cloaked in navy blue,

almost black,

as if they

splashed into a River Seine full of paint,

and it never washed off

their plump,

yet delightfully light

bodies.



And the paint stretches down,

surrounds their neck like a

lion’s mane that darts into the same

gray that paints the sky

in the winter Hemingway described

to me in his book.



Raccoon stripes wrap around their wingspan,

and their eye contact

is like that of a Hitchcock psychopath

who wants to ****** me for

not sharing my sandwich.



I am easily guilt-tripped by the pigeons of the world,

and Parisian flutterers

are no exception.

I rip off bits of my sandwich to throw to the grounded creatures

caught in a plight of hunger outside the museum.



They pluck at the chunks too big for their beaks,

and I slide off my perch

to meet and greet with the birds,

flustered by the sudden supply of bread crumbs

and who peck and beck towards me.



I hear laughter, but it sounds old,

and I turn to face the security guard

who shakes his head in his seat, chuckling at me.



His smile is young, but his badge is *****,

like the street outside the metro stop for Notre Dame.

His duty makes him speak French, and I mumble English in return.



“Madame, please don’t feed the birds!” he laughs, and I push

my bread back down into my bag, embarrassed as an American in France can be.



I kick my feet up to hurry the pigeons away, and they fly up around me, like

a wave of the black and white color spectrum, caught up in the next surprise.