The walls of my room are swollen with your silence,
thick and smothering.
I once again mistook somebody’s lost, hapless wandering
for freedom;
your aimless tread for a path being forged.
Drunk with possibilities, I followed you singing
until your voice, which promised and scoffed at me in the same breath,
ended with a squeak in the night.
Inebriated and naked every time I saw you,
I wonder what pieces you took
(my words, my mouth, my chest, my drunken singing?)
and when I would realize they were in your hands,
long gone.

You keep asking me where my rainy day fund is.
I don’t remember the last time the sun came out
and where I’m standing it’s been pouring for years.
You ask me about my rainy day fund
now, because the power has shifted
out of your hands and into those of a
Thing that kills — get this — not just poor people.
You ask me now, when my contributions to you
hang precariously in the balance.
My death means less than my consumption
still — my purchases worth more than the food,
the medicine in my shopping cart.
It is so strange to stare into the eyes of a cashier
both of us waist deep,
both of us without umbrellas,
our clothes clinging to our bodies
and our bones bared to the wet cold.
Steeped in want —
we see you start at one drop on your face,
and beg us to save you from drowning.

I used to think that I would find God again
in a woman’s breast pressed into the palm of my hand
her soft, tired whisper landing on my tongue at the end of the night.
I still look for her
but I have found God
in the dark corners of a small apartment,
fragrant — something on the stove —
alone, starting over.
And I have found God
in sacred solidarity with every working person
who talks harder against capitalism
without ever learning the theory —
whose steps fall into rhythm with mine
clocking in to rent our bodies and voices out another eight hours
or longer.
Usually longer, it seems like.
I have found god
while she is elusive, and
her name is used by many things that are not her
and still she goes by many names.
One day, maybe I will breathe one of them against a woman’s neck
on her jawline, and into her mouth
and for a moment,
be saved.

I have never once been something to someone and not meant it.
Too many people have sang about their worlds being shaken by love
for me to talk about the way you ran through my veins
and maintain a shred of originality.
Besides, you were one of those people, and your words are lost.
In the space between us,
they only carried out your true intentions and died at their wits end.

So I won’t.
One poem written for you in the front cover of a book
that I forgot to copy — my own words, lost as a gift in your hands
as they all were.
I imagine you casting out that page as I, too, burned your play in my kitchen sink.
We are both artists.
You are an actor, and a good one, I believed you —
but I have never lied on paper.

The one thing I miss about the condo
is all the windows.
When it rained, you really felt it in every room
and the sound was on your roof
and not the apartment above you.
I keep my curtains drawn
because my single window looks into another window
and I do not want my quiet life
projected into their home
like a B-Movie they can’t turn off.

Half of my head hurts, and
I consider a time before migraines, and
I wonder how much day-to-day pain is normal.
Ever since I stopped cutting, in what ways
has my body determined its own destruction.
Downing another coffee or another beer
or another person who doesn’t know me
I wonder what part I still deliberately play
and how to keep getting away with it.

I don’t miss a lot of things.
I do not miss the drudgery of a neighborhood
awkwardly placed on the line between a suburb and
a “bad area”, growing up while people laughed,
“that’s Clareview for you”,
otherwise knowing no concept of danger outside my parents’ condo.
Inside was another story, loud
and angry. Smokey and old.
I do not miss it.

I also don’t miss the dead-end job –
of course, I still work there sometimes.
Of course, I tell people of my other work first
when they ask,
and in those small moments I tell a story of redemption.
It’s not a true story.
My body still walks those five halls
and is walked upon for fifteen dollars an hour and
it keeps me in a home with one window.
They tell me I must be grateful.

Being grateful is not enough.
I am grateful for the icepack on my head
and the neighbor’s cat, who greeted me outside at night
until they moved away.
I am grateful for all the people who’ve stayed –
and when someone is kind to me with no possible motive,
like a gentle word from a stranger in the supermarket,
it moves me like nothing else.
Even for my home with one window,
I am grateful –
It is the first home that has kept me safe.
It does its job, and so do I.

I ask myself, what more do I need.
Vague, shapeless prospects of other places,
other people, all conjured from nothing
walk through my mind.
Upon these, I have built my identity
and in the name of them, made every single decision,
every declaration.
They still play no part in my day-to-day life.
These things are my religion.
They too may not exist.

I press my icepack closer
and I open the window so that I can hear the rain.

Reflected hard in the subway windows at night
vacant, hunched figures propel homeward.
How many times do I gaze out
only to be met with the downturned faces of those inside
bathed in the same yellow light.
I, too, illuminated
in all of my losses – count them,
try to make out their shapes in the bag clutched tight in my lap.
I feel the drag of my weight along the rail, howling,
and still, I look out.

Spitting out the hooks in your mouth
is hard, because 1.) they’ve pierced your lips
and not in the fun, fashionable way
but in the way that makes you bleed and pulls
at the wound, tearing, infecting,
and making it hard to talk and
2.) without the hooks, what pulls you out of the water?

The hooks, like some kinds of work, like
some kinds of love,
were actually anchored in the ground all along
tethering your wretched, writhing body underwater
but you didn’t know that.
You didn’t notice that you were drowning.
Where you’re from, you’re nothing if not hooked.

Spitting out the hooks in your mouth
is hard, because it still hurts to speak after –
in fact, it hurts to push up, follow the bubbles of your breath,
and break the surface –
gleaming light blinds you, fills your head,
sounds you’d once forgotten, distance you couldn’t imagine –
and all around you, nothing.
Open water.

You held him for a quarter of a year
and grieved his presence the next half.
You can’t buy back that half any more
than you would consider selling that quarter.
A bird lands in your open palm
so you freeze, hold your breath,
and time stops.
You observe each other.
Inevitably some movement from within you
or outside of you –
a shudder, a sound –
sends him flying.
The world moves again
and your open palm closes and falls to your side.
Some day you will remember the imprint of his steps
and you won’t really think about his flight.
Just one fragile moment when
he came to you, and
you held him.