the stars, dull and whistling,
turn south with the beggars and birds.
They are nothing
now that I've touched them.

baby tomato

noose

lasso

lasso

scarves

over the counter

duct

hoops

Israel Day Parade, New York City-May 6, 2007

The good things
are small
when you can get them.
A wishbone fossilized in asphalt.

You can fly down the dark
hall of the Williamsburg bridge
on your bike
at night
very late at night
and feel like a blood cell
racing out of a vein

The red-checked shadow-flecked
moan of ghosts above your head.
The buzz of the road behind you.

The yellow construction lights
in the skeleton of a new condo
all lit at once
hardened webs of honey
thick spit in a hundred throats

You get these things
on the brink of exhaustion.
Perhaps it is exhaustion
that gets you them,
tunes your sense to something,
anything anything anything
good.

gagging
the sound of a chop
faint and ridiculous singing

The good things
when you get them
are usually at night.
Night which makes everything
smaller
and small things seem silent
and in the midst of so much bigness,
bits of silence are
good to get.

Night.
Late.
Nobody's watching the moon anymore.
That's how late it is.
You wonder how
a street
with so many windows and doors
can lie so silent.

The good things gotten at night
picked to be personal
a shattered, hammered, sparkling star
among a million others
that would not exist without you.

The Living and the Stainless Touching

Leanna brought home flowers in her bicycle basket at night. It made her feel regular, normal, like a real person. To buy flowers...usually the daisies they dyed all sorts of crayon colors-hot pink and purple, cartoon yellow, medicine red, solution blue. At these prices it was easy. Flowers were cheap in the city. Especially when you bought them at night. Most of the guys that ran the bodegas would mark them down in the evenings to try and get rid of them before they started showing signs of death. There were some who maybe kept them the same price, but she'd learned which places to go, and felt at these places that her consistancy made her a regular. Or just regular. A normal person with a routine. Truth is, the only two things she did every day were fingering herself in the shower and brushing her teeth. Also the shower then. But her own fingers in her own shower were so entwined as to qualify as a single act.

The flowers were once a week. Old Portuguese guys. Old Indian guys. Old Polish, Puerto Rican guys, old guys on the run from the former Soviet Union. Setting up shop. Hadn't seen their families in years. Probably never see them again. They smiled at her. They liked the white girl.

Dyed daisies were mostly three dollars at night. Occasionally she'd smile back just right and get them for free. Leanna had a square face and kept her hair pulled straight back in a tight, well-washed ponytail. But a smile, and a especially a smile late at night can't help but come across as pleadingly pretty.

Leanna's hair didn't match her personality. Her mind wandered a lot. A person casually observing Leanna from the opposite side of a bus or park or restaurant where she was eating alone would most likely think her quiet due to her wandering mind, serious due to her jawline and fastidious due to the ponytail. Two of these were correct. She mostly kept quiet, and took most things very seriously but Leanna was not, is not, could never be a fastidious person.

Sometimes when she bought the flowers she picked out an ice cream as well from the three foot deep slide-top freezer. There were three foot deep slide-top freezers stocked with ice cream in every New York City bodega. Even in the ones without the cheap flowers...not that those mattered. The guys kept them stocked, stacked-little pints one on top of each other in teetering towers down to the bottom. Leanna believed the best flavors were, in fact, at the bottom and so would press her stomach up against the peeled caulking at the edge of the freezer wall and lean all the way in until she toppled a bit and a casual observer might draw a comparison to a little girl lost in a box of toys...but Leanna was rarely casual. She understood the power of an upside down woman.

The guys liked it. Her ass in the air. Not much of an ass, but a girl who could be expected at least to smile in a few moments while paying for flowers and ice cream, and at the very least...an ass in the air. It was often enough to save her seven dollars (the price of the blooms and the sweets combined)

She tugged at the door of her room. It screeched open. Warped floor. The previous summer it had been very hot and she had found an old air conditioner on the street. Leanna borrowed a power drill from the guy across the hall and found some strong boards and got it up into her window, but while she was away one day the thing leaked chemicals and water all over the floor. This warped the wood. The first day the door wouldn't open, there were several moments of hysteria as she imagined she had been sealed in by an enemy. The hysteria subsided some minutes later after she tried to picture this enemy and came up with nothing, and subsided completely when she gave what she desperately declared "one last push" and flew halfway into the kitchen. She came inches from hitting her head on the pointed end of the counter where the dirty dishes were stacked. Leanna was not fastidious. She still had that power drill.

But what was this business of imagining enemies? Leanna had no friends to begin with, and therefore no breeding ground for future enemies. Leanna had had no friends really ever and therefore no breeding ground for present enemies. Enemies happen when you tell people things and grow to expect things from them. Or worse, when they grow to expect things from you. Leanna had roommates. Living with people, one can suspect them of being either.

Tonight it was Moose Tracks and purple daisies. Roommates out. Flowers and ice cream. Solitary indulgence. "Life's little luxuries." Many times she would repeat these things she thought in her head, knowing how normal they sounded and liking how regular they made her feel. Leanna avoided saying regular things out loud for fear of sounding sentimental, but it was a great comfort to say them in her head. "Life's little luxuries."

She was feeling anxious in her body and behind her eyes. Little tension headaches, little knots, but why? It couldn't be found. As if something was about to happen. The feeling you get about a ghost in the room or an impending punishment. She set the flowers on her table, a cardboard and reconstituted wood desk from the salvation army. It had mold in the legs from the water incident the previous summer. Leanna liked the faint smell of mold, though. Made her feel removed and missionary and even...unkempt. An old word. Made her feel old. Not that she was a woman frightened by life's possiblities, eager to get it over with or have it all in the past...she just liked old things. Not old men, though. Not men at all. No enemies.

She had the couch to herself tonight. For now she was alone. She sat. Unbuttoned her pants out of comfort and tapped the top of the ice cream pint to test its readiness. Solid rock. Fifteen minutes at least. She was tempted to switch on the television but the damn flowers in their damn plastic wrapper required immediate attention. It is lucky that New York City guys who run bodegas that sell flowers do not usually wrap their flowers in opaque paper as Leanna would have forgotten about them the second her ass hit the couch. Left them to wilt slowly while she slept. Not that it was a comfortable couch. In fact, she suspected it was infested with ants, and it was constantly covered in too many blankets and even articles of rather angular clothing left there in the rush of morning...belts, shoes, stiff pants and dress shirts...so that when you sat you were perched atop a constantly shifting island of disorder. Like a dung-piled wagon being pulled by a rampant donkey.

She liked to imagine the couch was a burning landfill. At that moment, sitting on the couch, rather than turning on the TV, she imagined the couch was a burning landfill. This gave way to imagining her mind was a burning landfill. Then the flowers in their clear plastic called and thankfully so. Imagining one's own mind to be a burning landfill is the sort of thought that gets the TV smashed. And it belonged to the roommate.

She picked up the bouquet and started towards the kitchen. Checked her phone first. No calls. None were expected, but no calls. A busted glass crash. Her ears tuned immediately for another and caught the sound of a landfill burning, the paint cans and old fireworks within it's gray-heaped gravy igniting and popping one by one. Leanna stood alone in the room. The above-ground train poured by her window like a cold air current. It passed. Silence again. A woman's scream, this time with direction attached. Other side of the wall. She took three steps and pressed her ear to the dividing plaster like a sleuth in a movie. A man's commanding slur. Leanna's concern ringing in her own ears, twisting the overheard violence into pictures. A bloody woman. A belligerent man. One third party who happened to be around at the right moment to hear this horrible thing and what would she do about it? Leanna stood frozen on the other side of the landfill burning and chewed her tongue. An ant wandered its certain way across the floor. She caught it with her toenail, cut it in half. She listened. Responsibility tastes like thirst.

Leanna poured herself a glass of water. One: to quench the thirst. Two: this brought her into the kitchen and closer to the door which would allow an easier intervention should this fight make it into the hallway. She set the flowers on the steel counter. Something so clean about the living and the stainless touching.

Leanna had never hit another girl in the face. She was apt to knock into someone accidentally in public to cure a bout of her own frustrated aggression, but was also apt to treat it as an accident and offer a bewildered apology afterwards. The fastidious do not deliberately shove. The frightened abandon their impulses.

She had hit a man once. Once, when in college, as most stories of daring and unexpected acts begin, she had taken a date with an almost stranger and he had taken her to dinner. She ate. He spoke. She nodded. He laughed. She wiped her mouth. He unzipped his pants in the car on the ride home. Leanna had struck him in the face and caused him to hit a Chevrolet Impala that chose that same moment to stop suddenly in front of them. No human damage was done. Toyota damage totaled thirty-five-hundred. Impala damage was taken at ten thousand. A collector's item. Leanna had never felt any guilt over that particular situation.

Another crash could be heard from the other side of the wall. A scream. A slur...something involving "you fucking bitch". She put down her glass of water. She walked to the door leading into the hallway. The same door that she unlocked every night to enter and the same door that sat like a stupid twin at the end of the hallway next to theirs. They of the crashing and screaming and gnashing of teeth. Not that Leanna heard their teeth gnashing. Not that she needed to with the sound of metal shelving being ripped from the walls. She took a moment to breathe and turned the knob. The sounds from across the wall cleared and abandoned their muffled blur. "Hit me in the fucking face." she heard him say.

It dawned on her a little, but maybe a little too late because she, angry at the possibility of damage possibly being done to a fellow woman, called out "Hey." In her most authoritative voice and right outside their door, the sound from her mouth pointing in. At them. "Hey." As if to say "Stop." As if to say "I'll call the cops." but with some less threat. A woman's moan. Several urgent whisperings. And with that there was silence.

Leanna stood in the hallway alone, while the people across the wall slunk to their bedroom. She ran a hand over her forehead and ponytail-a self-conscious reflex. She stepped back. She felt watched in a silent hallway. The feeling you get about a ghost in the room or a ringing that eats your ears. The feeling you get when you've interrupted strangers fucking. You'll see them in the hallway. You'll never stop noticing how much mail they get.

It took three steps to re-enter her own apartment. All done quietly. With an embarrassed perfection. She felt strange about her neighbors who seemed so normal in the stairwell and who came equipped with decent, clean furniture (she'd had strange and weather-talking tea with the woman once when she was locked out and had sat on their couch) but who were reality hitting each other with things and fucking with anger probably because they weren't ready to have a baby together after ten years of fucking. Or maybe because he was in reality, or she was in reality-secretly, embarrasingly, devastatingly gay. He'd never released the right way and was manic. She'd gotten expert at faking it with her eyes closed and buried in his sweating neck.

Leanna's thirst was suddenly and accurately the sort of thirst only solved by a beer. She shut out the light of the hall with a quiet shut of the door and kept the darkness away with the refrigerator open and humming. She had nothing. No booze. For a moment she considered hitting the bodega on the corner once more, but wanted to avoid the hallway. She didn't even really want to be in the kitchen anymore. Remembering the ice cream, she left the kitchen and returned to the couch where once she imagined her evening would end. Without eavesdropping. Without the muffled fucked up dysfunctional sex sounds of next-door strangers. She tapped the lid of the ice cream. She applied a certain amount of pressure. Ready for a spoon.

She didn't have a spoon. The bouquet of dyed daisies were wilting and abandoned on the counter. Leanna would have to go back to the kitchen.

Grandma

Mirror

snow

Barn

Door