[Poem In Which I Frighten The Man I Meet At The Party]
I don’t know how to be strangers with anyone—immediately,
I have to tell you all of my secrets: the way my mother read Iraq War
headlines to me in the mornings, age six; her outrage palpable,
the way we didn’t have a TV; the precise way I love—wholeheartedly and
obsessively. The pills I take, each night, the antipsychotic and the
antidepressant and the mood stabilizer. How I thought I was pregnant,
even though it was medically impossible, didn’t get my period for
five months, called it: tomorrow’s problem. The way I don’t like
rollercoasters, because I am one. What I would have done if I really was
pregnant. How I’m crazy, but used to be crazier—how I used to scare
people, how I still do—with the accidental overdoses and the trips to the
ER and the fear that wells up in my body like blood in a shallow cut.
No, I don’t know how to be strangers with anybody. You get it all,
or you get none of it. You get the shadows on the cave wall, and suddenly,
blinding light.
[Poem With Suicide Attempts] (CW: Suicide)
For Max
This time, I take an accidental overdose. It does
precisely nothing except make me dizzy and sick. In 2016,
M tried to kill himself too, hanging from the Brooklyn Bridge
like a snapped tightrope wire. We recount old stories over drinks
at a different bar because the old one is closed now. Nostalgia
in frosted glasses. I realize that I still don’t know his last name,
or maybe I never did. We’ve known each other seven years.
I’m not sorry. It’s easy for me to say, I love you, and mean it.
“Don’t make me go to hell and come get you,” M says, drinking
his tequila and cranberry and Sprite. He’s had a drinking problem
for as long as I’ve known him. Still working the same dead-end job.
We tell the same stories to each other, our tongues working over
the same syllables. Some things never change. I’m grateful
to him for keeping me alive when I couldn’t do it myself.
Somewhere in Brooklyn, there’s a girl breaking into a thousand pieces.
And somewhere else, her big brother is picking them up,
pouring her a glass of water, gluing her back together, piece
by piece.
[Poem With K-Hole and $200 Bar Tab]
I watched your eyes blur from the ketamine and realized how lucky
I was to be half-choking you with my arms in the front room of the bar.
In Chicago, an AmTrak runs over a deer. Later, in Nashville, him and I
argue over whose turn it is to use the shower. I’m not sorry, I’m in love
with you. Entertaining you, I tell you stories of how I used to be crazy,
how I’ll never get better. Get lipstick all over your mouth. I’m reckless.
I watch people watch us and know they want to be us, your face without
makeup, the city all around us in a slurry of neon. I’m going backwards,
but something makes me not care. Call it survivor’s guilt. Call me
a hopeless romantic. Far away, in another city, someone I want to
smother me in kisses is writing a story about yesterday. I hope I get to read it.
[Poem With One Night Stand And Catholic Guilt]
We kissed in the taxi cab, so we were best friends. In another life,
I remembered your hand on my thigh in the Uber, The Cure on the
radio, reckless joy. “I’m Native American,” he said, as if that meant
something to me, “I don’t speak Spanish.” The words rolled like
marbles on my tongue. A modern chulita, I didn’t speak Spanish either,
no more than the scraps I could pick out of conversations like leftovers
you pick out of the fridge. We went back to my apartment to have sex.
I felt no guilt, only absolution. How much I would rather it was you,
my longing a living being; it stood in the room with us. He wore his
beauty like a cape around his shoulders. One of many men to call me:
sexy, and possibly he meant it. Me, with my platinum blonde hair, my
lipstick smeared, my eyes flashing like a deer in the headlights. I knew
what I had done wrong but I couldn’t verbalize it. I wanted to fix every
little thing, smooth the pavement over like a steamroller, but there are
some things that just break, and that’s it—
[Poem with Apologia]
That was the year the cicadas came back, rubbed their legs
against ours, made furry offerings of sex and drugs to G-d.
It’s been seventeen years, you said, but still I remember picking
up their dead bodies from in between my toes at the house
in Princeton; I didn’t smoke cigarettes then (I was four).
I thought about the way time works, how it unravels.
My father has cancer. It lives in his ribcage, his colon.
I wish I could eat it—scoop it out of him like ice cream,
Break it into its elemental parts. I’m still trying to figure out
where you end and I begin, despite the distance; your reactions
so close to my own that I forget what is me and what is your
legs stretched out on the couch, your toes fidgeting. I’m sorry.
I want to be better, want to be a cleaner version of myself,
but I can’t squeeze water from a stone. I can only press my lips
to your neck one last time and go back inside the house with the dogs.