Ann, Vinalhaven Ferry, 2003

Countryside Ice Cream and Snack Bar, Pennsylvania, 2010

République, Autumn 2010

Paris, Autumn 2010

Breathing is an icepick.

My life spools out from the end of this line of ink. A cloud of resistance packs its ice around my chest. Everyday I breathe, fight through it. It’s a quiet, rainy morning, the trees fall in an arc. Writing seems like the only option to reclaim my experience. How can I not feel my life? I seem to ask this again and again. Ideas spark large then dissipate, I must “chop wood, carry water”, to actualize them: Follow up on the tiny details, lists, phone calls. In this way, dreams are sieved out of thin air and become real. The “known world”, the conscious, has limited avenues. There’s an underground river, though, and I have a lamp-lit, rickety boat held together with gaffer tape, soapsuds and beads. It’s a leaky old thing, barely seaworthy, but the wood is thick. I keep dry on a rope bed suspended above the wet floor.

360 degrees in Jamaica, Queens before flying to Port-au-Prince

April 2011

the last time i saw you

 

 

 

Centralia

            “Warning: Underground Mine Fire.  Ground is prone to sudden collapse.”

                                                                                                            -for Pasquale DeCusatis

April again, sky low and silver

as a handful of quarters.  Decaying leaves.

Forsythia in bloom and the squelch

of muddy grass perforated by high-heeled shoes. 

I’ve come to the grave in crooked lipstick and earnest

beige stockings, plastic-wrapped flowers clenched.

It’s easy to miss if you don’t know how to find it: back up

against the statue of Saint Christopher, take ten paces

toward the tree that resembles a bent man,

…nine…ten,    look down.

Mine fires fifty yards underground suck on the graves—

rows of sunken cheeks— town holding its breath.

Trans-illuminated smoke rises from gashes in the skin of soil.

I drop small prayers scrawled on airline napkins into the pit—

How far I’ve come

How long it’s been

Since the last time I saw you and we spoke in Italian

How then I knew you knew that would be the last time