On Sunday we walked along Independence
until we met the water -
that's always how it is with you,
not satisfied until we've found
that place where we are small
against the waves.

We forced ourselves through
a sea of tourists,
pretended we were not like them.
I pushed by a woman with a stroller.
A couple with a selfie stick.
I was focused on the end.

We walked on a runway of petals,
walked under a stark-white canopy -
the cherry blossoms were lighter than usual.

I kept my eyes directly ahead.

We paused twice (I counted).
You said we should.
We looked out to the water,
the monument,
saw the current in front of us
felt the current behind us
of the people we were
so adamantly not.
We continued on.
I hate taking pictures with faces.

On Sunday I wanted to stop
and tell you
everything I could not say.
But we both know I am awful
with the spoken word.

You see I count the hours
like an odd-petaled flower -
in 'he loves me'
and 'he loves me nots.'
I am a victim of a cold environment -
I am not used to sunny outlooks.

It is Monday and I want to tell you
that I didn't count the petals
today.

On Sunday I will grab your hand.

On Sunday I will look up.

On Sunday I will tell you
all I want is the water.
and you.

On Tuesdays I dream of moon-soaked swims among bay-big moons
Silver saucered jellyfish that ripple through our hands
Wednesday nights are underground-
Straight whiskey at the Cantab beneath a canopy of Marlboros and Parliaments
(I’m imagining the cigarettes-
I’ve always romanticized death)
I only think of Sunfish on Thursdays,
Just a single sheet and us and the water
And the thought that we are propelled by more
Than the wind and less than physics.
Fridays are midnight walks through Central Square-
That tree on JFK by the metal gate,
The cab I chased after. Your jacket.
I awake early on Saturdays to your blue wall
And freshly made yerba, lectures on nonlinear differentials.
On Sundays we sleep late,
Wrapped in sub-letted sheets
Waiting for your lease to end before Sunday does.
The ground is gone on Mondays, the sidewalk on Sydney street has crumbled
I feel first-trimester-morning-sick
And the sky is dinosaur-ending dark, thick with resentment.

On Tuesdays I dream of moon-soaked swims among bay-big moons
Silver saucered jellyfish that ripple through our hands

We threw our voices into darkness
Expecting a response
Getting only echos
Fell in love with stars
Already dead
Red giants make for disappointing soulmates
We are on a galactic level of
“Wrong place, wrong time” of
“if only’s”
I am running as fast as I can
But I will be
Five hundred thousand years late for dinner

Awoke Sunday morning
To words that were easier
Than the night before.
I was always expecting good
mornings
To be harder than good
nights

I asked you for a
Four-letter-word-for “very often”
You asked me to
Pass the salt
You didn’t know.
I slid it across the table.

Sunday morning was without
Saturday night-forced structures
It was without
Long answers to questions
That we weren't sure if they were
As complicated as they seemed.

Sunday morning left us with an answer for
23-down and
For 68-across
Saturday night we were a defeated blank
We were
An empty grid
Save a four-letter-word
For nothing
In tennis.

On Tuesday morning the report said
Los Angeles was beyond the heat wave
the meter had run out
and you turned back to a pack of Camel’s
after avoiding them for seven months and nine days
wreaking of olives and tanqueray
I was without mascara
it had been towed inside of your ’96 Civic
we walked around the morning streets
looking for beer and a way
to go back to before the street cleaners
took away your ’96 Civic and you
lit that first cigarette
We’ll do this right one day,
you said between drags of that first cigarette
I tried to get you to put them away
but we knew it was too late
One day in San Francisco
we were too young to be nostalgic
and yet we looked North
beyond the impound lot
with anticipation towards
milder weather
looked back at the ’96 Civic
being led out past the gate
looked down at the third Camel
between your second and third fingers
with regret I watched it fall to the sidewalk
I wanted to stamp it out
but instead watched the cherry burn
until only the filter remained
and the wind brought it to the space
in between two concrete slabs
we got inside your ’96 Civic
drove South along the freeway
you lit a fourth cigarette
gave a fifth to a homeless man
along the freeway
we listened to wordless music
with windows rolled down
you asked me what I was thinking
thought against telling you I
was already waiting for
cooler weather in San Francisco.

We met at noon between picnic tables and humid Maryland heat.
Either you or the sun made me dizzy, as I talked and you nodded.
We were both distracted by the thought of air-conditioning.

We parted in August among mini-vans and goodbye kisses.
My eyes followed the license plate as you drove away, we agreed to sail catamarans the next chance we had.
We had both noted there was something in the water that summer, something purer than the water from the Chesapeake.

We rejoined in December under a Caribbean sun, not as humid as Maryland’s, surrounded by water purer than the Chesapeake.
There was still a buzz around us, like the air before a Maryland heat storm, to convince us the year of letters was not for naught.

We fell back to old habits on the Dutch side of Saint Martin.
We talked like the future was a choice and we had opted out.
We avoided words like regret and yesterday and repeated words like now, now, now and we spoke in hypotheticals.
We planned our house, or what it would be if we ever got boring enough to say words like tomorrow.

We stopped speaking in July after one thousand four hundred days of avoiding the next.
We should have known we were doomed to fail when “our song” was by Old ***** ******* and “our house” didn’t include a family room.
We should have known when our plans never involved the word tomorrow.

I went to a presentation last week, the topic, “We Are Losing Our Young Men.”

The speaker talked about how boys these days are growing up without the thirst for first place, they're becoming complacent with second, that they're now crying in baseball. That men today are just not what they used to be.

I almost raised my hand, almost asked about today's young women, where they are, what type of state are they in, how do they compare to my mother's generation, hell even his mother’s generation.

I almost raised my hand, but didn't, I realized I didn’t care what he had to say. I got caught up in a film-reel of Disney classics and Mother Goose picture books read over a soundtrack of, “What do you want to be when you grow up? What do you want to be when you grown up?” stuck skipping.

I thought about the first things we teach young girls, what they dream about before going to bed, the role models we give them. We tell them they can all be princesses and to dream of fairy godmothers. We give them Cinderella, tell them there's no hardship a rich husband can't solve. We give them Belle-Beast relationships, and we fail to mention that if a man is an animal, do not kiss him harder or love him longer, you leave and don’t go back no matter how much he says he’s changed. We show them Snow White, teach them men will only love them for their beauty, teach them women will hate them for it. We give them Ariel, encourage them to give up their passions and talents and family to the first guy that promises them love. We give them Prince Charming rescues, kisses that awake them from eternal sleep. We do not tell them when they should become wary of slick mouths with a penchant for vulnerable women. I guess they're meant to figure it out on their own.
And we wonder why society is obsessed with the Kardashians.

The film reel stopped. I wanted to raise my hand then, wanted to give this pompous speaker my own two cents and tell him I’m not totally buying this whole “earnest, honest, father like figure” who wants us to “seize our potential” act. His talk has been aimed at the fraternity men that paid him to be here.
He’s smart.
I want to raise my hand and address my fellow “modern women,” but when I turned there were only six females in attendance. So that’s why the joke about his wife got such a poor response.

Had they been there I would have stood on my chair and told them this- One day we’ll be mothers, raising little girls of our own. Throw away your fairy tales and grab yourself a cookbook. Sit down at the edge of the bed and open to the dog-eared page. Tell them, “yes, you are made of sugar and all things nice, but you have this inside of you,” and point her to the bay leaves. Tell her how she has traveled from Russia to India to France. Give her black mustard, perfume made with caraway. Teach her the history of chicory, its medicine, its bitterness. Give her licorice. Give her tarragon. Show the vanilla that runs through her veins, the lavender. Teach her wasabi and her ability to make men weak from her strength. Paint her lips red in celebration of cayenne. Make her a *** of puttanesca, have her taste the oregano, the parsley. Tell her about the recipe for the rub of a pork shoulder that’s been guarded for generations. The black pepper, the white pepper, the cumin. Celebrate her complexity, the bitterness paired with sweet, the anise and marjarom, the cayenne, who cannot help but cry at the overpoweringness of cayenne. Show her the history of nutmeg, her trek through the Sudan, Egypt, Italy. Give her the religions she spread, the languages she introduced to India. Show her the slaves that worked for her discovery, the passages she created. Give her the empires she built, the ones she flattened.

Tear down the castles and open the spice drawer.
Paint her lips cayenne.

you and I, sitting on the dock
fell into the sky
while talking about death
and what comes after.

you and I fell into the sky,
our backs left the ground and
we flew head first towards the
stars and Neptune.

you and i talked about death
and our evolving relationship
with God,
or whatever you decided to call it.


you and I spoke of what comes after
the stars fade
and we are left floating
in a lightened sky.

you and i closed our eyes
so we could miss the sunrise.
we are finding footholds
on the rings of Neptune.

I’m standing there. Looking in the mirror.
Trying to reconcile the fact
I will never be as beautiful as a fish.

Words are hard.
Make up is harder.
I’m attempting to apply eyeliner. Straight.
My eyes are growing big and my skin is
turning scaly, making it near impossible for an even foundation.
I forget about the eyeliner.
**** it.

You had said something about being the right shade of blue.
You and Karen talked about it in front of the infinite binary tree.
You tried to explain to me the concept,
shades of blue defining us
colors that blend, people that blend
what shade are you?
I didn’t get it.
Still don’t.
I have a slow metabolism.

I look down at my dress.
It’s something like cerulean.
I wonder if it’s an acceptable hue.
Now it’s royal,
robin’s egg.
Suddenly, fuscia.
The fabric feels like water,
it ripples up my torso.

Back to the fish thing-
my neck is turning gilled.
The waves are getting bigger now.
Maybe I’ll go under soon,
fully under water,
be beautiful enough for a trout.

I can hear the ocean in the pipes.
I am ugly land bound.
I am diving down my faucet.

Lecture twenty-three of first period of the last semester:
Today’s topic – “What went wrong with Wall Street”

The professor’s trying to connect with the class. He’s trying to have us look past
Sagan-like hair, black pants poorly paired with brown shoes, sleeves stained with chalk, an undeniable excitement in his voice when he says the word “canonical”.

He’s trying to get us to see a forty-four year old father who watches The Daily Show before bed, someone that’s hip with the times. He says something about Twitter and that singer in the meat dress. He references Charlie Sheen.

He draws a graph on the board with three lines
red: Normal
blue: Poisson
green: Cauchy-Lorentz

And we’re all thinking it- What the **** is that green line.

He begins.

Cauchy-Lorentz:
fully defined by two parameters;
x-nought and
gamma
mean;
undefined
variance;
undefined
meaning
­graphs drawn in green have fat tails
meaning
a summation of green graphs with fat tails- a summation of par bonds will default with some non-zero probability
meaning
Lehman Brothers should have taken statistical physics

That is his joke for the day. Only students paying attention and students who bother with current events and students with a sense of humor laugh. It’s a small subset.

The kids in the sixth row aren’t listening, the ones in the Greek lettered shirts with their pledge names on the back and their laptops open. Sixth row is just close enough to look like they give a **** but far enough in the back so the TA’s can’t tell they’re checking their fantasy football teams. The TA’s sit in rows one through four.

The joke is for the kids in the sixth row. Anyone in the first through fourth, the ones considering graduate school in higher dimensional theory or quantum chromodynamics, doesn’t know what Lehman Brothers is, least of all a par bond. A joke about spherical cows? Laughter from rows one through four would interfere constructively off the chalkboards, but that is not who Sagan-wannabe is talking to, and the kids in row six aren’t listening.

They are watching Sunday night highlights, ignoring green lines and fat tails because, let’s be honest, they’re only here to get the answer to the question on the homework that they couldn’t find online.

The sixth row has taken what they learned in the lectures before this, the semesters before this one, the first days of classical mechanics, where they learned the universe is governed by predictable and definable laws, and given a set of initial conditions one can determine an outcome.

Salary|physics degree:
fully defined by one parameter;
sophomore-year internship
time;
ten years
mean;
one million

The sixth row Facebook’ed their way through the undeterminableness of quantum, the green lines on the board now. Their laptop screens hide the fat tails describing the bundles of par bonds they will be selling upon the completion of this semester.

This place is void of sound I walk
at night to catch glimpses of your
stunted wings through Akatarawa and
Whakatane I walk through darkness
waiting for your call your weak
reminder that you have not left
this place your plea for remembrance
in Aotearoa. Little bird, where is
Tane Mahuta now as the trees come down
for wider streets in Muriwai I walk
under moonlight trying to be unseen
like you trying to be mistaken
for the landscape in Rangitoto.
Little bird, I wonder what you
have done in a past life to deserve
no flight I imagine you are Maui
and were sentenced to a land-bound
life among the Pohutakawas and
Wheki-pongas and we have made
you our martyr thank you for the
fire.

at 6 i thought disney movies held the key to all of life’s answers.
that i could somehow talk to cats
and some day i would transform into something beautiful
as petals fell from roses.

walt disney, he promised me the sky was something constant.
he promised me it would listen, promised me it would respond,
most of all promised me it would stay forever.

its fifteen years later and i’m somewhere like Auckland
and i’m screaming your name to the billions of fireflies
stuck in the tar up above.
it’s something like 3 a.m. and i’m confused as to why you’re not answering,
why my words are being responded to by no one.

last time we spoke you said you were somewhere like Monaco,
or some other place with a **** name that evokes images
of long beaches, fast cars, and strong drinks.
and you said, “i love you,” and you said, “i’m busy”
and it’s been something like four months and i’m starting to think

that walt disney knew nothing of inter-time zone romance.
because if he did, he would know that the sky is
only a matter of perspective
and there is nothing constant in the waning of the moon,
or least of all the stars.

you are somewhere like Monaco and we are on
two different hemispheres. and i see now
that there is more than space between us
because as i look at the moon
you are staring at the sun.

you hung
suspended.

i watched you sail
led only by
gusts of wind
and car exhaust

i imagined you were a kite
or a song
imagined pushing you
with my thoughts towards the water

greedily
i watched you
hang

while
amplifying the sunset.

In the basement sand is melting.

Imagine that, millions of years of crustaceous love stories, rocks slowly poisoned until they, along with ancient deep sea lovers, washed ashore to become the nuisance of the crevices of leather seats of automobiles.

In the basement the rocky lobster lovers are taking new shape as
the girl in the goggles
with the hair
tied back into a bun
forces air from her lungs into the
sticky
clearness.

That can’t be very good for you, breathing in a million
(maybe more)
years of betrayal and ****** and friendship and laughter
between ***** and clams.
It can’t be healthy to take
in so much at once.

I wonder what it’s like to speak a language known by so few.
To walk down an aisle in the supermarket and reaching the curves of a coca-cola bottle,
the girl in the glasses
with the bun
cries uncontrollably yelling,
“Do you see that?
All the beauty and the sadness
in the waves of molten sand in
six little bottles.”
To give your soul a little clear house, letting everyone look inside
(without really seeing)
letting everyone walk around it, and nodding and saying
“Oh will you see what she did there?”
and seeing nothing but a misshapen
coca-cola bottle.

In the basement backbones are being melted into a new mold.

They are somewhere hidden in the waves I cannot read, amidst the million years I cannot hear of crustaceous love stories.

I filled three trashcans, granted the bathroom size, to the brim with crumpled college-ruled cursive, failed attempts at the marriage of language and vision, all the things in my mind I could not put to paper. I couldn’t find the million-dollar words I wanted.

I Google’d the “100 most beautiful words of the English language.”
Efflorescence. I would have liked to use that one. Or maybe petrichor.
Chatoyant.


I tried to give mass to chimeras.
They grew old easily, floating down a temporal lazy river.
Her tissue-paper dreams were torn by the hooks of hometown love.
My metaphors fell flat.

I tried to envision Parnassus, something like rolling hills dotted with vibrant flowers, plants with names I do not know lining the slopes. I am not familiar with Greek foliage. I imagined myself climbing, turning over rocks in search of inspiration.
I found only isopods.

Between 5/4 inch margins I constructed a paper balloon, my papyrus mausoleum. Here is my embalmed work. Blank. Blank. Blank.

Tissue Paper Snowflakes

like tissue paper snowflakes i
break easily
i
get caught up in notions of things like love
and days like tomorrow
and promises like tattoos dyed into the skin of lovers
stuck in memories like first dates and love notes and make up ***.

like tissue paper snowflakes you
are unique
you
are one of a kind.
in kindergarten they told me no two snowflakes are the same
even though probabilistically speaking
you are almost guaranteed to have a twin.

like tissue paper snowflakes you
want to be cold
you
want to be but don’t have the strength.
you could not support the weight
that is frozen water
that is imperviousness to nonphysical things
like longing and sorrow and elation
and things unlike make up ***.

like tissue paper snowflakes i
am deceptively fragile
i tear
from things that are crushing
like dreams
and lies
and arms wrapped tightly.
i weaken from over use,
i ignite from things that overheat
like cigarettes
and us.

like tissue paper snowflakes we
are from one sheet
we
once bled together
our crooked edges match to form
straight lines.
like tissue paper snowflakes we
found beauty in ordinary roots
we
created texture from flatness
and
complexity from things that were not complex
and
like tissue paper snowflakes
we are weakened only by our own accord.

Virginia Nicholson

How To Build A House In N-Dimensions

1. Begin with lines, pencil to paper (if they could exist) drawing graphite arrangements, N-space reduced to one, a structure viewed in slices. Imagine the bathroom off the foyer, the den off the dining room, viewable only as inked lines, dit-dit-dah, a contractor’s Morse Code.

2. Progress to carpet squares, linoleum tiles, the coral paint pairs well with the eggshell trim.  Dit-dah-dit becomes something useful to the non-contractor, “door” or “Master Bedroom” or “x hundred feet of pipe.” Envision the imagined patterns hidden in the bathroom floor, the kitchen hardwood.

3. Move to volumes, solids, conic sections, height. One story, two stories, a basement, an attic?, take advantage of the introduction of 3D. Upgrade the closet to walk-in, needs more carpet squares. A snapshot of a family barbeque, Charlie’s height 1D penciled in to the 3D door, marring 2D eggshell paint.

4. Adding time, the house is built, ages, gets sold to new families with little Charlies of their own, new markings on the cupboard door, 3-foot-2, 3-foot-5, 4-foot-9. Grass fades from Kelly to sand to Kelly, saturation a cosine function with respect to time. The Zoysia starts in one, breaking ground in two, growing in three, a well-manicured 4D experience.

5-11.    Include the things invisible to us, objects on the order of 1 meter, orders of 10E-2 to 10E9 seconds. Five to eleven drip through leaky pipes, seep through porous flooring, get lost in iron-rich soil and oxygenated exhalations. Five to eleven stay hidden, wrapped up in Calabi-Yao manifolds smaller than graphite hills and valleys marking little Charlie’s height, stronger than the 2-by-4s and stone foundation keeping strong in 4D. Five to eleven circulate undetected, seven dimensions shrunk to sub-pinpoint size, keeping seven dimensions of unexplainables covered until their traces are seen in the blades of Zoysia.