I see it now. The stacking, the rows and rows all built with pivots–some corners connected while
others stand abbreviated like a cliff filmed at the end of the reel. Even the shadows they
throw we invent story for. To extract one would be destroying a city, a planet, a universe. As
every answer built a question and every question built experience(and what does not kill you
simply does not kill you…so delicate and so tremendous like shaping the last sliver of soap
into a swan).

Are you unsettled? Are you warm? Did you ever consider the fingerprints, ever consider not caring
to leave one? The sixth grade visitations when I wore a red dress because I didn’t have
anything else, and the minister warned and soothed simultaneous with his talk of life being a
vapor, how one cannot command to hold it. However here I am most definitely more than
drifting. If it cannot be touched then how did I feel it, what of the room around me dancing,
my own eyes drawn to floor and feet as the snow fell outside and I thought of everything I
lost and gained from losing, and how and how. Then what of the way the darkness hides you
aside from the lone streetlight that refuses to be subdued by the curtains. The one that drops
on your face right on the lips. What of seeing that and the deep quiet wondering of I hope I’m
not too late? By the time it seems right to mention it, the night is gone. The light is back and
the magnitude fades. But that instant of holding and held has been known to keep me kicking
for days.

The acoustics in this room are unforgiving, still carrying our footsteps like offcenter drums–my heel/toe to
your loping stride taking two of me to catch up. And the art and the walls, how I found myself being
pried away since I couldn’t stop staring with the back of my hand to my mouth in some horrified joy with
tears streaming down my face. In other words, why I’d rather venture to the galleries and certain shows
alone–yet to find someone to cry with, who doesn’t glance around my head awkwardly searching for a
culprit. Sometimes I want being moved to be my secret. It’s really none of your business.

Unless, unless. To these back rooms you are invited. Sometimes. I leave it ajar–have to keep something just
for my palms to warm around. Or is it something I can call mine, is it just passing through–am I just a
system for it to circuit? These the type of questions that bob to the top when I’m sitting on the edge of
my seat at the ballet with a wet face. I let my nose run, I get messy. This, after all, is movement. I am
not a keeper of clean lines.

I treat the well-timed phone calls or playlist the same, a thing or two so slight yet shocking. It is how you can
smell a season. It is what you tape to the walls. It is walking away, just like it is staying, or what our
limbs do as we sleep. Thickets of spines all flowing toward the same source. My arrows will always find
some fat to sink in.

The emperor
is donating clothes again
articles with the tags still on them
polygons of paper strung on thread attached to
nothing.

bird shit on a siren

i used to believe
that one day the lions and callused hands of mermaids
would come and get me
sign me off duty
lop off the feet
sew kites to wrists
and i would have ten thousand wrists
like doorless hinges
like the broken backs of my books

& the sirens bring skipping stones
& the lions want meat

darling, may it be said here
that i chose to be on the roof
teetering between
gutter and something
that no force brought me to my ledge,
there being anchored by the myth of what is left

i stand here all
movement captured on camera–
a blur,
an eye dislocated,
a profiled cheek stretched
into a bawdy blue light
a freckled hamstring at the bottom of the ocean
shipwrecked shell

i hear my name being called
but keep walking
bends all breaking open, open
(as if the earth fell apart
and the waters dried out
and the ground didn’t care
and all the hammers were as soft as organs
and my mind was made up
to be convinced,
awake
slightly foolish

Renee and I will hit the road for Cleveland on August 18th. To keep it simple I will say this: we’re quite excited
about it. It’s been a while since our words have been hosted as guests in another city, another community.
We traveled a bit in the past through slam but that was different–a very specific kind of venture, and we
were younger. I’d like to say as writers we are stronger and we have a better grip on the wanting-it-so-badly
part. I look forward to being in a room full of strangers, shaking hands, sharing stories. Life is so short and
the world is so big and writing keeps me going. A rambly equation for me to solve but it works.

I’ve been thinking about things that maybe I’m still to foolish to ignore. Like death and going, how this instant is so
brief and the harder I hold it the more it struggles for me to let it go. I think about how it is inevitable and I
don’t want the inevitable, feels like the very breath is fighting against it. My drum still here and going strong.
I cannot stand to be so afraid of something beyond me. I want to read everything I can get my hands on.
Want to walk into the room over and over again and see that grin for the first time. You know, live.

At the end of this month I’ll be one year without drinking alcohol–I no longer possess any social ties to the elixir.
Along with sobriety returned a fear, some fear of the lack of control around me in certain scenarios. I’ve had
to think about the past again, think about where the defense first took its form. Possibly staying up all night
listening to the Smiths at the Ryburn apartment. I don’t know. It isn’t a welcome kind of reflection–it just has
to happen. I feel like the odd man out but I’m okay with it. Now I walk away. I’ve gone through dramatic
examples of what it can do to you…and god forbid I criticize my survival, but I don’t think people get that.
Maybe I just come along as bitter and hostile. I let that go too. I’m too old to start caring about what others
think. Out of my orbit.

I own no complacence, but I’m getting the itch to go. I’m watching the world move and twist and change around me–
yellow getting more yellow, buildings beginning new. I want to move and twist and change too. Staying may
not be the answer, and I’ve started on the homework early–first step being the imagining. Another
neighborhood, another state. Closer to the bloodline. I’m eyeballing the chem trail of the journey behind me.
Wherever I’ll go, I will be there–a classic sentiment that used to do its best to haunt me–now it’s a comfort
to turn another corner and know I can be wherever I put myself. Where is the placing?

The person who brought me to this city is moving away, and friends are married, and the stack of papers and
poems grows. The sun has faded all of the curtains and I tend to hum under the cicadas. I’m all on fire and
motioning water. Just enjoying it. This summer has been something. I’m twelve shades of dark and trying to
save money. I’m all full of questions and catching myself saying a lot of “when I was your age,” or referring to the
young-20’s as “kids.” Walking slower. Tango with the old dilemma of stay laying down and try to sleep or get up
and write your guts out. You know, living.

in my chest
like a fight
is my church,
doors open.

(draft, unfinished)

I lied to the neurologist
when he asked me if
I grind my teeth.
Post-appointment bus ride home I
realized it,
ran fingerprints from cheekbones to jawlines to find
the indentation of telltale tension.
The clenching creates a plethora of snake conception
from brain stem to tail bone,
wallflower of my walking
the shoestring of my voice.

And what comes after gray?
If I make it to sixty may I shave my head bald
may I braid watermelon seeds in beforehand and
plant the strands somewhere with adequate sun.
Yeah I’ve got stories
big and tender, microscopic,
stories that secondhand themselves in smoke
stories that smell like rust
stories that creak and groan
that wear wrinkles and yellows like badges of honor
lived in and worn
hovering still on rooftops I lived below
in the fossil of basements
a piece of paper
in my mother’s hope chest.

I leave a message with the doctor’s secretary–
“tell him I grind the molars to smooth stone henge replicas;
tell him the pressure makes my brain grin
tell him I heavy heart my practices,
digits to weakness unlisted.”
I’d rather hurt a little bit if it means survival
of the witness
and behind certain curtains I’m being busy
building back the charred corner bridges–

To the boy on the corner, eating sky.

Aren’t you full?
wrists runny with nickels pouring,
a crowd of one
galore galore,
juts of vein cresting
a concrete kneel with phone open
crushed pack of cigarettes and laundry smell
the red the bricks turn to flaunt the dusk.

You gnaw around clouds.
Fill the sink with bottle caps
labeled with sharpied dates, to remember.
Evidence of being anywhere,
line of cans on dresser, dusty with tabs popped and
drawers spilling flags you pull on–various sentence enders
like surrender, mating call, deflect and defense.
Never owned a television.
Instead, waits for night,
waits for the pollution left light
the drawn curtains across the street that flash like lightning,
curled up skinny on ledge selling the last pages of novels unread
reaching,
a young woman reading itineraries in the wind
hair whipped ‘cross penmanship–

As sure as one devours scent
as certain as bottom lip on flesh
raise one lighthouse elbow, sway slowly for ships
beckon wrecks with spilled beams,
he hunched in the half-dark singing
“oh sea, oh stranger, oh end–come find, come sting, come carry.”

Ode to Continual Loss
Paula Cisewski

1.
Finally, this plainness
I play host to. Play inside.

I could have sworn my
true purpose was to silently

lug the remnants of a city
around the world with me.

Yet, for now, I can believe
my life is big without

getting comparative or superlative,
can’t anyone?

Or, too,
I have had to bury
some of my homes.

2.
Did I mention that I grew?
That I began to take care?

Whatever I could have said in prayer,
wouldn’t it have been the same as anybody? As garbled
from any second tongue phrase book?

Dear God:
Where is the bathroom?
What is the special of the day?

3.
Eventually a boy was born unto me.
I recognized him.

He was my city and he is
my city and that

is not always fair.
How one habitates,

runs around making.
A city was born unto me.

Hypnotic boy happening
by with his dead father’s nose.

by with his missing uncle’s wavy hair.
My city is my exact same eyes

looking elsewhere. A mother’s
trained hushing. A boy

who has borrowed nothing.
A son was citied unto me.

He moves forward to where
I have always and never lived.

4.
Dear God,
I am sorry that I get bored.
I love those trees.
Where are we?

5.
Plus I like to slip my hand inside
pockets of coats in the thrift store.

Tall aisle of pockets. A subway token,
a neatly folded prescription slip.

A body lives inside a single day, then
The finished days file one by one

to live inside the barracks of a body.
There’s a turf war on.

I want to call them split ends. The little fractures wrinkling through along the surface here or there–not really widening old
fissures, not really starting new ones. Just tiny things, crackling across like the limbs of bare trees during the
appropriate season.

The good and the bad start them. Like a couple getting on the bus and splitting up their seats so they can each befriend a new
stranger. It happened, I witnessed it. Like the new things I find out about mom that aren’t new at all–things from when I
was a kid that I can do nothing about except get angry, an anger I have to throw in a general, anonymous direction
because the hurt is so buried, so commonplace, and kind of forgotten. Like meeting my new nephew and letting him
sleep in my arms for as long as he wants. Like being sober.

I’ll stay in earth tones with a fingerprint of oil in each elbow bend. I try to remember being small, and it seems so recent and
so untouchable. What am I archiving for? At some point the memories became stories. At some point I stood in a
kitchen and made myself dinner, ate in the quiet of a rebellious sun beam. Part of me feels the need to make note of
everything. The harm is gone. I’m just taking it in.