5:57pm

Been watching the spider in the corner of my window.

He is now humongous.

I think he ate the other spider

that was living there

and that’s why he’s gotten so big.

I've been trying to figure out 

what makes him move.

I poke and prod his web.

That seems to do the trick.

I've noticed that 

he changes sizes

depending on the date of his last meal.

I've noticed that

one of my hairs 

is stuck in his web.

no matter how small

I found some spiders in my room

and I thought it would be good to let them stay

and grow

so they could catch any other bugs in my room

that might be worst than spiders.

I now have 10 houseflies stuck between my window and their web.

I have a veritable flock of housefly sheep

roaming my bedroom window

and a pack of spiders

acting as their shepherds.

The spiders are so thankful to me

for choosing to let them stay,

they leave me the little fly carcasses

left behind after their feeding—

symbols of respect and appreciation
that are not lost on me.

the lighthouse at two lights

Today I spent 4 hours at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Located at the beginning of the American paintings wing
was this one Edward Hopper painting of a light house

that held my attention for probably 45 minutes.

I decided that what was most remarkable about this painting was

how the shadows were rendered.

Later, I rounded a corner

and found a long rectangular pink flowering portrait, gilded by lilies

it was a real live Alfonse Mucha painting

of an actress portraying Joan of Arc.

In one of the statue halls there was a statue of Perseus

standing with Medusa's head in his hand.

His sword energetically occupied his right hand while

the gorgon's head hung in his left,

her tongue obscenely lolling out of her mouth.

Standing in his shadow, my neck inclined up towards his face,

I realized that even when I find myself completely free to roam 
a massive, nationally-renowned art museum 
full of different kinds of art,

I seek out

and am most struck by 
the pieces only once removed from their inspired forms.

(Of course this claim about statuary is debatable,

but can you hold your hand out to Mona Lisa

and touch all 3 dimensions of her face?)

That evening around 5 o’clock I went to dinner alone.

I grinned to myself the whole time I sat at my solitary little table.

I had never been on a date with myself before,

I had never been in the company of a girl I enjoyed so much.

Here I was! Alone! With her! In a Thai food restaurant in Midtown!

It felt naughty, in a good way,

like sex in a playground at night,

and as the sun began to sink

behind the roofs of the tall buildings in Midtown

I though it must be about time for me to be getting home.

Before I left 
I thought about taking a picture of myself with my phone,

at my solitary little table,
with my plate of half-finished Thai food,

but then I thought

perhaps it was a little pathetic

to be happy about a day spent alone in the big city.

After all,

how many others had found themselves in the same place as me,

and how many had felt the urge to create about it?

depth itself

I often dwell upon a night 

that will happen the distant future

where I come home

after going out with people who are nice enough,

but who don’t quite compare to the memory I have of you.

As I drop my purse on the kitchen table,  

and shake my head, trying to clear it of its new-found standards,

I will shame my heart for its stubbornness,

for believing that I am owed something more.

I will sigh, and fall back heavily into my couch,

my mind will drift back to those early summer days,

to the wettest and coldest June on record, when I missed you the most.

I will remember my heartache

how it seemed to mimic the cold rain that fell resolutely on that sleepy Jersey periphery,

how it blanketed every leaf in those tall woody forests

and soaked into the moss and shingles of each suburban plot.

I will remember the helplessness I felt—

because what can one do with a feeling that is not spite, not anger, only sadness?

What could I have said, what could I have written?

What depth could I have brought to an emotion 

that was deep, dark, cavernous, empty—

that was depth itself?

Even now, I imagine a time will come some day,

when you are standing staring eastward

with some woman’s slight and chatty voice in your ear,

and I will be standing, staring westward

with a coffee pot brewing behind me.

You will be looking towards me,

and I will be looking towards your back,

and we will be united around the globe by one solid gaze,

forever looking in the same direction.

script for your answering machine

Hi, it's me. 

I thought I might reach you

You’re probably busy

I’m just calling to catch up

I know I’ve been kind of quiet lately

I haven’t really been up to much of anything

Haven’t gone out

Haven’t met anyone.

I've been thinking, reading, writing a bit

nothing good or inspiring

nothing really to discuss.

Well, I was just calling to check in

to say I miss you

and that I’m still here.

Give me a call back

when you have a chance,

no rush

I hope you're doing well.

M'bye.

Acts of Hubris

Act 1: in which the author speaks unfettered by shame

He broke up with me for the first time

in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart

in Roswell, New Mexico,

when I told him I was certain that everyone in the town was an alien.

There are some definite things we can do to try to live more in the “now.”

Like allowing ourselves to check the weather for today and tomorrow,

but not the next day,

like following our heart and obeying our impulses,

like assuming the best in other people’s actions,

and underreacting to tragedies.

When the strings start in “I Stand Corrected” by Vampire Weekend,

I always think of the first time I wanted to kiss him.

I was sitting in the back of Emma's Kia with him, and she ran a red light.

We sped through the liminal zone

between stop light and crosswalk,

he pressed his fingers to his lips and kissed them,

he looked above

and touched his fingers to the roof,

transferring his kiss there.

I wanted to catch his eye

and tilt my cheek

as if to suggest

where he ought to plant his next one.

I know I'm not allowed to be in love with him anymore but

Jesus Christ am I still thinking about him.

I’ll imagine him napping in his bed with his head near a window,

I’ll imagine him driving his car to the office he works at,

I’ll imagine him all clean-cut, getting some drinks.

One thing I never really got down was the feeling of his lips on mine.

The best I can do is to describe it as

two clean fingertips

pressing softly together.

I want to tell you, dear reader,

about the mornings I woke up to

every night I spent at his house.

One morning, while he was still asleep,

I stood on his balcony and stared at the house across the street and

watched a mother cat nurse her kittens on the porch.

Green leaves had been knocked loosed by gusts of wind

and had fallen onto the balcony during the night.

I reached down to my feet

and touched the leaves with my hands.

I’ve come to learn that the seasons are kind of like that--

they always come all at once.

Like you’ll lift your head one day and realize

that at some point the trees grew leaves

and now they’re all green

or you’ll wake up to realize

that fall has blown in

and there are dead leaves all over your back porch.

The color of the leaves are like a bookmark in the year

marking your place.

It is true that as we get older, things get more complicated.

One time when we were drinking at dinner, he touched my leg

and asked me if I had ever been in love.

At that moment I was currently feeling like he was not someone I was in love with

so much as someone who had consumed me,

someone who I had become completely lost in.

I said, “I think so, but you know, I’m never really sure.”

Actually, I fear that I have already met at least 5 people I could marry.

Actually, I’ve been wanting to know, are your parents still in love?

I just don’t understand how he came to consume me in the way he has

I just need to remember not to hate people

I just need to remember to assume the best

I just need to underreact

{she takes a breath} Whoa girl, easy girl

Okay, I have to really think about this now

about how I want to remember this.

Dear reader, bear with me, please, and thank you.

I remember sitting on his balcony in the cool, weightless air just before dusk,

hearing his voice as a warm swirl of cinnamon in my ear.

He held me like a sweater on a coat hanger, suspended and still.

I was lulled into a stupor by the smell of clean laundry and men's antiperspirant.

I remember his face on a screen when we were separated,

curled under my covers alone in my house beginning to cry and he said,

“Oh now don’t make me come over there.”

I remember when I stood screaming in the thunderstorm

in the middle of the block, under the neighborhood trees

and he kissed me briefly without his shirt on.

What if I told you, dear reader,

that I have always been able to love something as if it were my baby.

What if I told you that this is true

because I was born a woman

and it’s just inside me.

What if I told you that I held my baby’s knives for her in my bedside table

That I held my baby’s hand as she voided the contents of her stomach out of the car window

That I held the ruler straight as my baby cut a strip from the fabric?

Sometimes I’m called upon to act this way with him.

The way I could see him smack his lips in the driver’s seat,

prompting me to lift

another orange slice to his lips

which he would then suck into his mouth from my hands,

laughing every time.

I covet this moment.

I hold it to my heart like a magnifying glass,

insisting, “See this! See this!”

Dear reader, you know how we’re all made of stars?

Sometimes I believe that this terror inside me is

how I experience the weight of the Universe that is inside all of us.

There is just not enough room in my brain

for his body and mine.

When my brain has been consumed by memory of him,

there is not enough room for myself in there.

how did you come to consume me so

how did you come to consume me like this

I want to think about him in segments

and then piece him together again into a whole person

I want to think about his smile and his chin, his eyes like cool cold metal,

his shoulders.

I want to think about his shoulders and his arms, and his wrists,

his hands, and his fingertips

his forehead

and his nose

and his ears

and his lips

and his lips

and his lips

{she takes a breath} whoa girl easy girl

When I found myself in his arms that month,

that first month we spent at the chain-link fence

sheltered by the branches of the trees overhead,

I felt like a virgin for the first time in 5 years,

awkward and overeager.

I was too nervous to move my hands anywhere below his neck

my heart was aching and hoping he’d just move them for me.

His brow was dark and graceful in the light from the porch and

it was hard for me to look at it.

I cut my palm on the metal fence

while we fumbled and kissed

while it healed I would look at it fondly.

It reminded me of him.

We decided that we had to let it die

so that it might be preserved

so that it might always feel this way.

Periodically, he would ask me if I was okay with how this was ending.

I didn’t say so, but I wanted to die

with him in my heart.

I wanted my feelings for him to be preserved in my heart

like a mosquito in a ball of amber.

Dear reader, what would you have done?

Reader I know you cannot see me but there are millions of small galaxies

inside my eyes

Reader just let me help you

I want to help you

come here

let me hold the ruler straight

yes, I’ll hold your knives for you in my bedside table

you’ll be okay, so long as you get it all out.

I remember when we drove through all of these shitty dead towns

and we prayed for them because they were so shitty and dead.

As we prayed he held my hands like I was in labor,

that is, not with intertwining fingers,

but clasping thumbs.

I breathed in and out

whoa girl, easy girl.

He never seemed to harbor curiosity for my past,

especially my romantic past with other people.

He would stop me with his hand and say, I don’t want to hear it,

whereas I lapped up any little detail of his past.

I dwelled upon them and passed them between my hands over and over again,

I ran them between my fingers like strands of my hair,

or held them in my pockets like a good luck charm.

I remember eating Japanese food off of his plate,

I remember the records we played and the television shows I recommended,

I remember being on the second floor balcony of his house,

this is where I would hear most about him.

Act 2: in which the author makes claims she has no right to make  

The ceiling fan wobbles as it spins,

lazily disturbing the hair on our heads as we sit

on the blue porch swing and use the balcony

to talk and drink on.

We are the only ones who use this balcony.

We are the ones who use the blue porch swing there.

We are the ones who use it to step out onto in the morning

to see if it is cold or hot

and decide what to wear.

This balcony reaches all the way across the front of his house.

The blue porch swing hangs there between two fat, white pillars,

topped with ornamental curls and leaves.

When I sit on the swing with him,

the pillars act as two tall guardsmen,

guarding us with their fat, white bellies

from anyone who might be walking or driving on the street below.

There are some deck chairs there too,

I don’t know why they are there because we never sit in them.

They are canvas.

They do not rock slowly back and forth.

They are not blue.

Examining my shoes as we swing,

again and again they gently

bump against the old wooden coffee table,

I think to myself “I wonder if he knows

that I always liked this room

before I even knew him.”

I wonder if he knows that I sat in that room when it belonged to someone else,

before it was his.

The walls were still mustard yellow and

the curtains were still navy blue and

the bed was still in the same spot

right next to the door to the balcony.

When I found out he had that room in the house I said to myself, “No way.”

I knew I liked that room when I was in it the first time

but I did not know I would be there again.

I did not know I would be there

the night before Thanksgiving

sitting on that blue porch swing

absorbed in my shoes

bumping again and again against the coffee table at our feet.

They were white shoes that were now off-white,

the color of untreated canvas

and my white and fuchsia polkadot socks

were peeking out from my cuffed up pant leg.

The dusk was dark, deep and blue that night.

He would not look at me when he spoke

he would look ahead of him

with the corners of his mouth turned down.

When he spoke he explained to me

that it was around this time last year,

around this time last year,

that the pneumonia happened and the suicide happened.

He sipped his beer in the middle of a pause.

I asked, “It was pneumonia?”

“Yeah, pneumonia. It caused a respiratory failure somehow.”

“Holy shit.”

{i took a breath}

“And you were really close?”

“I’d known him for years.”

“How much later did your friend kill herself?”

“About a month later.”

“Jesus. How did she do it.”

“Overdose.”

“Jesus.”

The light from the wobbly ceiling fan was on,

the exterior of the house was washed in it.

Even though he was not looking at me, I could tell from his words

that this was a vicious pain.

This was a pain that occupied him corporally.

It was a pain that seeped into the very tips and tendrils of his lungs,

that invaded the deepest and darkest chamber in his heart,

and crept into the mustiest space between the smallest bones.

It went as deep as a pain could possibly go.

It was determined to get him.

I remember looking at the leaves on the trees,

I remember noticing the birds on the power line taking off intermittently, one-by-one,

I remember wanting to grab his words out of the air and stuff them in my pockets,

I remember wanting, desperately, to become the same kind of heavy-worded story.

This was one such story about his past

that I wanted to carry around in my pocket as a good luck charm.

I wanted to be that.

I wanted to be the kind of story that fell on ears like violent heat in the summer,

I wanted to be the most solemn kind of knowledge,

or the most precious fact in the world,

to be secret and rare

to be precious and heavy like bars of gold

to be narrated in gold-plaited words

to be the first, big, elaborate “O” at the start of the story.

He was the one who suggested we go inside and put on a record but

I was the one who, still feeling his words, wanted to kiss him

I was the one who wanted to lift my shirt over my head

I was the one who wanted to turn to his bed

I was the one who looked at him over my shoulder and saw his mouth

softly saying, “Jesus.”

Some weeks later

when he was driving me somewhere

he told me what he remembered about what happened next that night.

The streetlamps shined on intervals as we drove past them.

He told me I was wearing my rainbow backpack

that was something he vividly remembers, my rainbow backpack

but he said he’d especially never forget my face.

He said he could see all of my layers and facets

could read all of my sadness

could see all sides of me

as I walked out of that Walgreens.

I wonder if he knows that I did not take out my phone to send a text while he was talking

I would never do that.

Inside his car it was all grey and black and the light from my phone shone on my face

I’m sure he saw me typing on it.

I was making a note in my phone about what he was saying so I wouldn’t forget.

I remember him asking me if he should come in and me telling him that I would go.

I felt like I was protecting a child,

covering their eyes during a sex scene in a movie or

cleverly directing their attention away from road kill

by pointing at a oddly shaped cloud.

I also remember that I asked him for 20 bucks to cover half.

I also remember saying thank god under my breath when I saw a woman at the back counter.

She prepared the bag for me in a normal, regular amount of time.

At the time I wondered if she was trying hard to act normal.

I mean, it was nearly midnight and here I was, asking for the pill,

I figured she could probably imagine just how it went down between me and him,

everything going normal until he was done and we looked down and realized

or maybe she thought I got assaulted,  

or maybe she thought I was irresponsible.

I thought about pharmacists with moral qualms about this kind of stuff and

I wondered if she was one of them.

Or maybe she didn’t give a shit

maybe she was just doing her job.

I paid at the pharmacy counter and went out to the car.

It was strange to walk out of the store with a bag in my hand

without stopping at the checkout counter.

When I came outside he was standing on the curb

looking down into the parking lot

that’s when he looked up and saw my face.

I put the bag at my feet when I got into the car.

Then, I picked it up so I could read the box on the ride home.

I read on the box that the pill could cause nausea.

I hoped that would not happen to me

I did not want to have nausea around him.

I wanted everything to go back to normal after I took it, I did not want side effects.

I put the bag in my purse when we got back to his house,

I remember that I did not hold it in my hand.

He went to his room to put on his pjs and I went to the bathroom to take the pill.

I stood in his bathroom in front of the sink.

I popped the pill out of it’s packaging.

I examined it between my pointer finger and thumb.

I tried to figure out exactly how all the aspects of this night fit together.

When I was on the blue porch swing just a few hours earlier,

I was trying to think of ways to become meaningful to him.

In that moment, all I could think of was to die

like they had done

and then I thought, what if i got hit by a car on my bike.

I imagined him at my bedside

as I lay comatose

his jaw set, his eyes milky with tears

beginning to feel that vicious pain resurface.

I remembered that it seemed worth it to die

so that he could attend my funeral.

I remembered wondering if my funeral would be his first or his second or his third.

And what exactly was about to be terminated?

Was anything?

I dared to think that perhaps this

was the death that would solidify myself in his mind forever

but this is not a death.

Dear reader, I have a confession to make.

Some days, I bike through the intersection

without checking to see if the cars at the stop sign are actually stopped.

Sometimes, I take the corners fast when the roads are wet.

When I took the pill

I used water from the faucet.

When I came back from the bathroom

he gestured for me to come sit next to him on his bed.

I tip-toed to him and tucked myself into the crook of his arm

He said, “I’m so sorry.”

I turned my face to his and said, “Oh, it’s not your fault.”

If he liked hearing about my past romantic experiences,

I would have told him that this was not the first time I have taken that pill.

Act 3: in which the author realizes

Our view from his balcony was always obstructed

by roofs and trees and power lines.

I suppose they possessed a certain kind of aesthetic

in their own right,

but I find that nothing curves my nerves

like seeing open space before me.

We held hands in the car as he drove me home,

we laughed when we vented and discovered

we were driven to anxious silence about the same things.

“We’re so alike,” he said, and we laughed.

I remember putting my mouth to his in the hallway,

I remember feeling his mouth on my cheek in the dark of the shed,

I remember he walked with me the whole time on the mountain trail.

When I look at the big, expansive houses on my ride to school,

I do not imagine that determination, hard work, and perseverance will get me there.

Rather love, passion, natural talent, and luck.

I know that I am young.

I do not know what it means to have a child,

to be a parent.

Perhaps we have that in common, dear reader.

At this age,

I would welcome any identity you could suggest for me.

I would welcome a definition of self based on someone else,

based off of you.

I would welcome those pressures, and I would choose

to stand by your side.

I would choose

the comforts you could afford to extend to me.

Dear reader, I know that I am young.

Eventually, it all peters out.

Eventually, it ceases to come at all.

The notes stop.

The texts become irregular.

I realize, “I never actually met your baby sister.”

“I never saw a picture of you when you were little.”

“I never made you breakfast when I said I would.”
“I never got to know your parents.”

I guess, dear reader, that I will leave you with an image.

This one I have come back to again and again,

it is the one of him kissing me on my bike.

On the day he kissed me on my bike

he met me on the corner of his block

with his hands in his pockets.

I had seen a figure raise its arms and shout and say something.
I yelled his name and he shouted back, “Yes!”

It was him.

I asked, “Were you waiting for me?”
He said, “Sort of.”
He had just parked, and he figured he had beaten me, but he thought

“I’ll give her two minutes, and then I’ll go inside.”

He came to me as I slowed my bike.
He straddled my front wheel with his legs.

And like a sculptor’s hand to clay, he held my face

and kissed me deeply.

Such a romantic kiss
with so much feeling,
a kiss I could feel reach deep inside me
and smear ointment on my wounds and shush

the thing inside me that wanted a place to put its knives,

the thing that would not calm down.

{she took a breath}

Do you remember last week when it hailed?

That didn’t make much sense because summer is right around the corner.