1
Tell me again how you danced with him on the wings of uncertainty, how you sunk into a whirlpool of promise without patent in an age of scarce truth. I want to know how you let the sand slip between your toes, how the biting wind brought tears to your eyes. The ocean calls to you and you can’t refuse it. How does it feel? How does it feel to be well-versed in the nature of love?

2
He never asked me to love him, but I did anyway, and that was the root of the problem, because he’d already swayed with her for one two three four songs, brought her to a sidewalk café with ten dollars stashed in his pocket and leaned in. The heart has four chambers. All of his were occupied.

3
There’s a house across my street where a bitter woman lives. I don’t wake up early enough to see her smoking on her front porch, but on Tuesdays my cousin spits his anecdotes across the dinner table, frothing. There’s a feud between them because he walks to City College every morning and she’s got an affair with a cigarette and he has asthma and she hates the sound of his basketball on gravel. There’s an ambulance wailing outside as he throws hateful slurs around, as if that has anything to do with anything. I don’t answer. I never do. The sirens go on wailing.

4
I have a brother who defies gods on the daily and he’s too angry to help me with math when he comes home, too caught up in the tangle of politics politics politics, and I have a brother who wasn’t born because modern medicine is a misnomer, and I have a brother who talks to me only when I’ve spent too long locked in my own room. They are themselves and they are each other and they are me. I love them all, sort of, except I could love them better if I knew them.

5
Here, I’ll tell you. Here’s a novelty: Potrero Hill on a Sunday and a sidewalk café. I haven’t blinked the sleep out of my eyes but you don’t care, you still take my hand and steer me away from coffee and drop me off at the DMV. No one takes us seriously but we don’t care we don’t care we don’t care and such is the nature of love. Come back to the beach, you say. I hate the beach but you don’t know that and never will, but you’ll be waiting there, I know, so I take the car keys when my brothers are asleep and drive home to you.