Out of the woods the sky has turned
to sherbet and I can’t stop it from
melting down the horizon
Run for the bridge
my hips swinging with leftover
month-long momentum
I can’t stop them
Abundant pointlessness in trying
to hold on to the sky
I want to tell you about it
instead I stop on the bridge, breathing
cracked open and uncomfortable
where I need
Walk out of Lean Crust on Fulton with an
extra large pie under my arm, ostensibly
to freeze, eat later, but
come on.
Biker dude, missing tooth, stubble, elbows
his friend.
Holy moly, looka the sizea that pizza that girl’s got!
Oh man, that’s some kinda pizza!
Smile, wave, rub my belly with my free
hand. An old man in a collared-up trench,
a small fedora
covering the rest.
That
is
a pretty big pizza, he growls, looking
at me and every no one.
Did you ever fall asleep with death
in the corners of your mouth? Or maybe,
it was just
M&Ms and pasta.
Just before you drift away, your jaw
pops so loudly it startles the dog, and you
are sure it’s broken now, except you can
move it and it doesn’t
actually
hurt.
But it’s broken.
Well, struggling to watch a shitty season of “Scandal”
is more fulfilling than trying
to follow along with the latest socio-political
brouhaha on Twitter,
where some level of Dante-ish grad school hell
rehashes itself daily,
where 140 knows no nuance,
where patience is mythology,
and no one’s anger—
no one’s pain—
is tolerated.
Not that you’d know,
you got a job in the city instead of going to grad school.
Then you find yourself saying,
“In the old days of Twitter”
like some privileged douchebag who
likes to read herself think.
Shit… “douchebag” isn’t a very feminist slur.
Good thing you’re done playing the mainstream
white lady feminist
reindeer games,
because now, no one will read you think.
“I’m trying to come to the point.”
Tingly tingly temples, likely caused
by that broken jaw.
“Is dry skin holding
YOU
back?”
Holy shit, YES.
HOW DID YOU KNOW.
We spent a century teaching everyone to broadcast
themselves, called it
“communications,”
and we are dumbfounded when no one
on the Internet actually
hears.
They don’t pick up our hurt, it all
spirals down a teflon toilet of
“WE CAN’T HAVE NICE THINGS.”
The dog is staring at you, crocodile-style, from your office,
cat-like in blaming you
for both the cold wind and the low-quality
dinner. Yes, the same creature
who eats poop and duck heads from street garbage,
that one
didn’t like “salmon & potato” unless you
mixed in cheese. Good thing she doesn’t have Twitter,
you’d be down a toilet, with a broken jaw, no less.
You believe in life online, you do. You have felt
in the worst, best way, the fine line
between tools and weapons. You just can’t shake
the feeling that this detonation of hubris
vomit will lead elsewhere.
Like, duh,
(a) none of this is REAL, and
(b) there is no difference between you and me.
It’s physics, assholes.
Take me with you.
Tell me what you had for breakfast, show me I’m
human with your urgent optimism, with your links and your lolcats
and your monstrous balloon sculpture art,
take me and listen.
Post that quote I like, the one about the foolish mistaken
notion that we are all
separate from
one another. Take me.
Done with isolation prescribed to me, ether
penetrates these crafted culture walls.
You find me
and say: you are not alone anymore.
Out there, not long ago, I was screaming into
nothing, broadcasting, waiting for my pheromone signal
to come back, tell me I’m not crazy
after all.
Now, maybe I’m addicted to this stupid blinking light but it means I’m holding
you with me.
We dig Pavlov here.
I want you to blaze info flow into the grooves
of my fingertips. Make me feel revolution in my bones, stop
jacking me off with silly antics,
blind me with delight instead.
Make me hurt with overload.
I was alone before.
Take us with you.
Rig this game, let your crafted walls fall, make
the conversation
yours, at long last.
I see what you did there.
Hear me. You have no choice, not
anymore. We’ll whisper into cultures’
new ears, we will tell them what we had for breakfast
how it is here in
these shoes,
and what we will do about it.
We have the kind of heat
in our old tenement inspired by slumlords
of the immigrant poor’s memory. The kind
that clanks its way into oblivion
degrees, makes your nostrils beg
for saline, makes rice paper blinds
above the radiator blow in the breeze.
The window is shut.
Nora, the subletting French exchange
student helping to gentrify the 4th
floor, knocked on my door last night
just 5 minutes after a fantastic crash
shook the dust out of the drywall.
I need help, it fell, I cannot.
In her living room, I laughed. They don’t
have air conditioners in France. Our heat was
too much for Nora, she opened the
window. The A/C dangled outside by its
circuit-breaking cord, like an anvil,
like a grand piano.
We hauled it in.
I showed her: this is how you close
the heat down in our building.
Storypoems from the Lower East Side (and Beyond) 
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