June
You know it’s summer when your back is broken across the crown
of the road. The cars, tired in tar, track their black prints along
the latitudes of your inner arms. Hey, the sun is buzzing and the flies
know they are only mimes yet to learn their muteness. The dizzy
birds ditch the whip twigs in new-leaved trees. Who’s to say if they
are building home or leaving a memorial—something that clearly didn’t
grow there, something that took effort. You know it’s summer because
the songs you sing are wet on your tongue. Without storm, without sea, we
can drown on the asphalt, right here near the fresh paint: canary stripes
by lightning white. Everything marks something. Don’t pass, turn
left, remember this. Remember the way the street retreats west before
the hills hide its egress. Remember it’s summer and there is nothing
left to melt. Light has piled on light has piled on light like it were
building a home here or a memorial to the shivers that brought us together.
Apartment One Continued
The shadows arabesque against our pale wall, our wanting—what
could we know of kaleidoscoping histories, weeks spent chewing
hope like stale twenty-five-cent gumballs, the dumb gravity
of fuzzy carpets that smell of old milk? We weren’t twenty-one yet.
The conversations danced nonsense around poopnewtons
and the death of independent radio. The future was blacklisted, the past
anonymous, the present thrashing on our tongues like the last sloppy
spasms of a mosh pit after an encore. We had boxes of generic
pasta, soy sauce and curry powder. We had seven inches stacked three-
feet-tall. We had sing-a-longs to Don’s Ex-Girlfriend and Radon and
Spoke. Outside, the hurricanes did what hurricanes do to traffic, to street
signs, to electric lines. Outside, the roaches, as they always do, found
ways not to drown. Later, these shit apartments would be condos. Later,
we’d never sing a chorus together again. There were no more tickets, so
there were no more stubs. All new evidence is light and the power is off.
Extensive Vamping
I am the caught chord caught
in this half-waltz, the half-bed where
your words sag into words
and pauses. The pauses let me
up for air in a minor key, air
I repeat as air, I repeat as the last
phrase before your secret phrases
find the walls, echo like walls, like
this progression. A progression is
a looped lie. I earworm, loop
myself into myself into the melody
bed you write on. You write me
into the background of the background
but I am your rhythm, yours.
Anthem
I guess the strip malls and potholes and lines
of roadside geese aren’t the melody, but the back-
beat. The hospital complex looks lovingly
down on the local craft brewery—its gravel lot,
its well-lit outdoor dining area. That is the harmony
line. The university is split by the main drag, its library’s
east windows reflect the local coffee shop, the party-
tinged pizza joint, the train. This is the melody. I sing
my hometown like the punk rock lullaby it is. There is
salt in my voice and sweet corn and used vinyl. Oh, the gulls
here have two seas to choose from. If liminality is not
your thing, move along. If sweet potato and bowling
alley don’t mix well, please don’t sing along. Listen, no
home is for everyone. The muskrats and foxes fit nicely.
So do the antique shops and the porn stores. We are part
hotel here. If that can’t fit on your breath, whistle by.
If it can, there are five hundred years to sort through
in the switch grass, in the need to slow down just a bit to see.
Portage
The wash bruised
the sky, the spray wrapped piles in sighs and this
is how we said here. You’d chew some
stale Big Red, let the fire take
your breath, lend your lips
to mine sometimes. And there were names
carved in the rail and old
salt sparkling grey while we flirted
with the next day. But the fog only
erased, pushed the dates
out of the way as vacations stretched
their legs and became the lives
we called our own: the address, the zip
code. The wharf fell to sea and the spot
where we held holds only razor
clams and a view of land. And I learned
to say your name into the water
in my drain and hope it found its way,
one last secret
piece of me. Perhaps on a pebble
beach at dawn, you’ll try
the fresh foam on, my accent
in the cracks in your lips,
on your lashes, on your lids.
