For the girl with the bow in brown hair,
the heat from the upstairs
restaurant cures the street where we walk,
the freight’s in on the track,
you can tell by the horns,
I from the diesel smell below the
afternoon clouds, faint above,
sometimes when we speak a heart rate
somewhere peaks,
another graph pinned to an office wall
shows this clear,
sometimes when we talk tense chests
fear the answer you may say,
the graph strays past paper and onto
those office walls, in red with a palmed
smudge where you forgot where
the words ended.
For the girl with the bow in brown hair,
your eyes are theatre-light reflections in twenty-four hour
window panes sat packed neatly off the corner of West 47th
and 7th, for you’re my central Times Square.