the sorrows of your changing face
New York is a new city every day. There are neighborhoods within neighborhoods. Curry Hill is a mere two blocks containing at least sixteen different Indian restaurants. Little Brazil is a sliver of a side street tucked inside the ever-sprawling Times Square. The Chess District is just two stores staring angrily at each other from opposite sides of Thompson Street.
My new favorite band is called My Girlfriend Left Me For a Hipster. I wear all my costumes so well. Tonight walking through Union Square, one of my least favorite pockets of the city, something about the white lights, the warm air, and the lovers clasped together recalled the Plaza de Espana and how I wish somebody loved me. Where were the glasses of sangria, where were Sivan and Brennan and Jesse and in silk scarves and long skirts, talking about how we were going to write poems and be young always? Where is Marcus to dance with me in an airless ballroom? I wish there was a way to tell everyone how much they mean to me.
After rent I have sixteen dollars and forty-seven cents to my name. I have new jeans from a five-dollar sample sale. I want to make a business card that says Writer/Contributing Editor of Heeb magazine/Brooklyn Society Girl/Aspiring T-shirt designer/Future Gramercy Park key owner. I think I have a couple of things figured out. I may not know the eye color, profession, or personality of the man I'm supposed to love, but he must think that Of Montreal's "Spoonful of Sugar" is the most romantic song ever recorded. Where I live there must always be bridges and a skyline. And someday I will finish that book about my parents and show it to everyone but them. And the same man finds his way into everything. Michael and I both have poetic incubi/succubi. I miss him. I miss Charlottesville. I meet people who have lived in New York their whole lives and feel sorry for them. New York is something you must earn, not something you must be given.
When We Were Young
You thought that we should go
to Ecuador, buy a car,
let me wear your coat
and learn to translate amid
a crowd of stars in Spanish.
One year later in a train car.
A pilgrim soul? I recall
orange juice in a dirty glass
and you are singing now
your sharpening hipbone in Miami.
Could we fathom oceans
in our landlocked courtship?
Hot water across my wrist
and the sorrows of your changing face.
That time you broke your elbow.
I do not know how many
bridges it has been since then,
whether time can be measured
in half a mirror and the same
favorite Yeats poem.