home

This city is a (possible) home. The streets run wide (seamless and uncracked). The light is pleasant but you won't have to squint your eyes (reminds you of that day at the park in the spring with your father; the cotton candy, the man painting a picture of elephants). This city will be an echo.

This city has a square in the middle and the grass is sprouting now (were grass stains real?). This city waits under a canopy dim purple for dusk (technicians man their desks). This city has all the comforts of a (possible) home. The water streams from pipes on high (listen). The farmer's market tables fill with fruits, nuts, and vegetables (barely miss the taste of soil; remember the film dark under your nails) all grown from seeds stored long ago. The architects have ensured it will be tall enough for a carnival to come through (remember the state fair, the summer and the freckles on his shoulders). This city is action, promise, your dead language. This city is a home (possibly).

Studies show you will find familiar feelings in time: a sun warmed bed in the morning or his pillow dented next to yours. The oatmeal will be too dry then too wet and your shower will not stay hot. A shirt with his scent (untraceable) at the bottom of your hamper, wrinkled with filth. Your parents in front of a house and a wooden stork in the ground. The tulips or kites (a dream? No.) red dot the grass and the sky. Studies show that the city (underground, inside the mountain's mouth) will make the best possible home.

Forget your old city (gone, soon). The streets baked in the summer's heat and the vines crawled up (crumbling) walls. A signal: the waves (remember--your ankles swallowed in the wet sand) are quiet now. Look for your breath in the air or your shadow (no, ash) on the wall or the birds (quiet now), trading places on their power lines, harkening twilight. The monuments, the cobbled streets, the springs, summers, autumns; now only winter (the sirens, the tumbling; not a dream not a drill).

The trees are only saplings (new and teeming under false sunlight) but there is speculation they will grow. There is speculation their branches (like roots) will reach towards the soil.

to be

The grass grows on its own out of sand, so should he have felt guilt ripping it out with each hurried step? The mist maybe waters it, the sea air too thick to do much else, he thought as his tissue thin lungs bore on. The night had given way to new humiliation, given way to a morning still dark, still grey, but backlit by the sun somewhere. He could not compete with this world, this hunk so infatuated with limits. The sky shakes hands with the sea, the waves pound the sand, the sand swallows his feet, his weight and all the weight around him keeps him from drifting into the one place with no limits, the one place forever collapsing, expanding, folding in on itself. A limit: the path a secret takes from mouth to ear, brain to memory. On the ferris wheel over the water, mood still reflecting all the cheap gaudy boardwalk lights, he had swung the gondola grabbing the cage and throwing his weight. She had screamed, clutched her hands to chest and laughed. They were kinetic, hands waiting to connect, to start the cascades. A limit: this desire in the dark. On the fairground swings she sat in front of him, hair pulled up showing the soft of the nape of her neck. He had grabbed the chains to her swing and held tight. He could have whispered in her ear, through the wisps of hair from the wind, and they'd be caught in the circumference. He felt his palms redden from the chains, a slipped grasp and the centrifugal force pulled them apart. Consequences exist for limits crossed. He could still feel her skin, taut and littered with raised bumps--fear. He could still feel her grip, so tight around his arm before loosening. In an instant it all got swallowed by the dark--her pigtailed grade school face, the encrypted notes they'd pass through lockers, the smell of her first car, all the times the path veered, his months away, how their small town preserved her just so. Face slick he walked back-turned to the seaside town. Before him stretched the sand all brown and green, the fields and their brambles, and the sky a morning grey with three tufts of smoke dotting the horizon. The smell of her stained his hands. He laughed, should he feel any guilt at all.

The boy stretched back on his bed, feet still on the floor, and pressed four distinct notes out of his tuba. Each sound descended as the girl in her pale pink dress sat on the velvet armchair, pushing her finger tips to change the color of the fabric. His English when spoken was thick with German, but it came out softer than she'd grown used to in her time abroad. Men in bars all over Berlin had hungry eyes and harsh consonants. She missed peanut butter, the sand of the east coast. She missed contagious weather, patterns free of Russia's jurisdiction. Her only friend from home had finished his semester two weeks ago and it took those fourteen days for her to realize then congratulate herself for not ruining their friendship with sex. Now the apartment she sat in was unfamiliar, the living room separated from the bedroom by only a white sheet on a rope. She could see the instrument as part of the German's silhouette, she could see him lying in the spot she would be as soon as her glass was empty. It wasn't until his mouth hot with whiskey was on hers that she realized the music had stopped. The German stepped into the bathroom and left the girl in the room on her own. She poured the rest of her drink down the sink and pushed through the sheet. She sat on the edge of the bed and felt all the alcohol swimming in her calves. In the bar down the street the two had been pushed together by friends spouting Getränk! Gespräch! They spent the night whispering in germglish, swallowing both pints and the excitement of hardly touching. For the first time the girl did not pull away when a boy kissed her unexpected. She felt a small accomplishment, the sand in her hair finally washed out, the fairground music fading. The German's night stand was a collection of glasses of water and candy wrappers with a pile of books. On top sat the german edition of the girl's favorite book from high school. She recognized the raised lettering, the gold on blue of the hardback edition. She flipped through the pages and saw his notes, some of which she could not translate. Her favorite part still lay somewhere behind his bookmark. She wondered what got lost in the translation--was he reading the same book at all? did he deserve to in the first place? The change of heart is almost always slight. Escaping audibility, it can never be traced to memories of a girlhood night stand or a mistranslated passage in a coming of age text. The girl closed it and crawled under the covers. She shut her eyes tight, opened her mouth slightly and pretended to pass out. The German returned to the room and stood for a few moments at the foot of the bed before turning off the light. There was a pause before she heard his body sink onto the couch on the opposite side of the sheet. In 72 hours she'd be on a train to Italy where, on a boat, she'd be joined by her mother and the two would celebrate a birthday.

He grew up in the countryside in a sprawling house. Vines wandered up past his second story window, the view outside rolling green with a small pond. His father had built a diving board out of wood summers ago, but all the changing seasons, the expanding and contracting took away it's spring. The winters would find him in Munich among stiff-collared boys in blue blazers, but in the summers of his youth he'd return to the brambled fields with his family. Days would pass in a hazy heat, lazily sleeping into the afternoon before heading towards the kitchen for a glass of water. There was one early afternoon mid June, the yellowest month of all, when the house felt too quiet. His mother and sisters would sometimes go to town for the fruit stands and his father spent most days outside working on the grounds or cars, but the air in the house felt disturbed, as if the last words rang through panic. He turned the corner into the kitchen and found blood-soaked rags, blood on the floor, blood running down the door to the yard. He was alone, no sign of bodies. He was alone, truly alone, an orphan at sixteen, the sole survivor to a horrific crime. The boy invented motives, imagined culprits. Was it fast or slow? Did his sisters have a chance to cry, his father a chance to be brave, his mother a chance to say I love you all? Why had he been spared--had he been spared? He slid to the floor. The peach tile was stained a dark red, the grout once the color of his sister's freckles now rusty. A call would come within ten minutes, from his mother at the emergency clinic. There had been an accident, the father had cut his leg just above the knee on scrap metal. They had all gotten into the car in such a rush, there was no time for a note. Until the call came, however, the boy was with the weighty realization that he was just a body on this earth. How gentle, what he had. To be.

sub humus

"Forget what kissing feels like," Madeline tells me, our formal introduction, but I am tempted. Dressed in army issue olive, we climb down the hatch inside the missile silo door, knowing months of dark and waiting stand before us.
For a woman she is strong, never talks about her mother or the boys waiting above, only sighs and says she misses her freckles. We take vitamin c pills and I watch the honey in her hair fade. We lack any entertainment but the games that we invent; Madeline's favorite being Guess the Season, mine I Am in Love with You.
"Winter, probably," I say.
"What makes you guess that?" Madeline asks.
"It's a cold, cold war up there."
Madeline lists the landmarks she's seen, a catalogue we know to be final. I am the one man in the world with this knowledge. Intimacy blooms out of this secret, the period looming like my thumb over the button. We sleep underground, missed by our families, answering only to the commander in chief. Picked at random, he told us, as if 300 feet underground isn't enough of a humbling place.
We sleep underground in this silo. Kind of like living in sin, where her habits still seem damn near endearing. We sleep underground, kind of like brother and sister in a hotel room; two beds by each wall and all the space between so hollow, all the sleep sounds at once familiar and foreign. We sleep underground when the alarm goes off, telling us what the night sky so far above used to.
Things change and Madeline contracts lingering eyes, a hunger the rations won't feed. A chain reaction follows. Just like the cascading avalanche waiting at the end of this, our clothes cascade, our hands small avalanches exploring . I feel the most selfish love for anything: that she is becoming me, that I am inside her and a part of her and the chain reactions fill the silo, echo off the warhead.
Sleeping it off, Madeline dreams of a boy building a fence, a boy unaware. I hold her tight and instead of smelling her, I smell us. This was a mistake and even if conditions improve up above, ours will get worse from here, the days longer but colder yet. Once exposed to the sunlight our love will live a half-life, decaying over terra firma and scattering to the four corners. I am the one man in the world with this knowledge, the knowledge of Madeline calm in her sleep. I am the one man in the world with his finger on the button, and I am tempted.

man/wife

The waiting room remains stale, all coffee pots and frayed magazines, the smell and colors not sterile enough. The waiting room doesn't change names when I'm not waiting anymore. The waiting room is for waiting, all nervous handed, for the man with the smooth voice and cookie baking wife you'd met with earlier in the fall. Doctors pass through in their blue and white, and the occupants sit on their own, carpet gazing, avoiding eyes or doorways. The television blares the network news, as if there is a world outside.

It's strange to sit here with my dad growing cold. He is still in a room down the hall with the yellow roses and the window view parking lot. His eyes are closed because a nurse shut them for him, the same nurse with sweet brown eyes who fluffed his pillow and sponged his back. My dad might come walking into the waiting room, IV dragging behind, hospital gown gaping open, lacking all dignity with knees knocking. He can't, but I wouldn't be surprised if he did.

It takes four days to happen. In four days my hair turns dark with oil. In four days I read the same interview in the magazine from April and it is personal and I know the answers behind your vague wording. It's nothing personal, it's publicity, you don't have to say it again. The freckle on your lip has been airbrushed away. The missing band on your finger didn't need to be. It takes four days of little sleep, no eating, my father and I suffering together. It takes four days and then, the morning the sun first breaks and starts to melt the snow.

Cole, when we met you told me the greatest thing about yourself, hiccuping from excess, you said the greatest thing about yourself was that you will never mess up this bridge and then you dove head first into the chorus of the song on the radio, the song for some different girl, one more natural than me. You bellowed the words down the stairwell as I left that night, a voice you only use on new girls. The words, worth repeating. I thought I could say them but you never wanted me to, did you? I look for trace amounts of that voice on the answering machine, our source of contact, but it's not there. This is Cole and Anna, leave a message. By tonight I will be erasing my own voice.

My dad is giving you his guitar, a Hummingbird, and you don't care. I'm in white, a shorter dress for the reception, a back yard bar b q at my parent's ranch. Play a song, Cole, play a song! Faces change from excitement to acceptance and the silence recedes into polite conversation. Instead you play modesty, thank my dad quietly and retreat once more. I think you're shy. He needed it more than you.

My dad's lungs are full of fluid but his eyes still so wide the day you call me from one state away.
"How is he doing?" you ask.
"Not well. I think we're going to the hospital."
"When?" you ask.
"Today. We'll see. He doesn't want to go, but if it's not better this time tomorrow, we have to."
"It's that serious?" you ask. "I didn't know."
"It's happened before and things ended up fine. It's seeing my father like this--he's like a child, I just--" I shutter, on accident, and cover my mouth. My voice comes out next foreign and warbling. "Cole, I just--"
"I'm coming back," you say.
There is silence on my side of the phone. My eyes are shut tight and I'm up against a wall.
"After tonight," you say.

My dad's eyes are closed, but he can feel me watching him through his sleep. I know this because his hand reaches up, weak as it is, and scratches the place on his cheek I am staring at. My back is turned to you, but I can feel you in the door way now, three and a half days late. You place yellow roses in my lap, for him, and I turn my head. I ask you to meet me in the waiting room in just a few minutes, dad's a light sleeper and he just fell asleep for the first time in-- you leave. My eyes shut again, this time not to black. The glare from the window makes everything white, red. My dad's lips are on my eyelids. My dad can feel my eyes moving beneath them, the warmth spilling down my cheeks. I open my eyes and my dad is still there. I open my eyes and my dad is still gone.

In the waiting room the magazine sits in front of you, cover facing down. I imagine:

Cole sits in the waiting room. In the stuffy room he feels itchy around his collar, his cuffs. This morning he put on the sweater Anna bought him but now regrets his choice. What did Cole think, that (even now) she would fawn over him, how the sweater matches his eyes? On the table before him sit magazines for homes and gardens with recipes and diets. He flips through the one magazine for men, months dated. Cole stumbles upon his own article, an interview in a Brooklyn bistro, the source of indigestion. Cole sees his picture doctored at the hand of some waiting person, a small, dark ring drawn around his finger. Cole shuts the magazine and puts it cover down on the table, feels his face burn and looks away.

I lied:
Doctors must learn to speak with non-threatening voices. We're sorry, Anna he says and I thank him, a habit. I place a phone call to the man with a smooth voice and cookie baking wife, let him know the arrangements will be needed in a few days. I return to the now crowded waiting room, sit between you and a stranger reading your interview unknowingly. I see the ring I had drawn on the page days earlier, when my dad was he is, rather than he was. Neither of us say anything. I rest my head on your shoulder.

the story, followed shortly by the story I didn't tell

Eight years old my hair was light and my teeth had jagged edges like babies changing to adults. Matt Robert lived on the other side of the fence and my oak tree planted from an acorn would drop leaves into his yard. I stood on the fence splinter palmed and watched the leaf piles build up in late September, imagined falling from the post into them and Matt Robert nowhere to be found. His hair sat stringy and his clothes hung gaping.
There was the bunny pen tucked into the corner, hidden under the thick branches. We had two: one black with a white stripe across the middle and the other white with big black rims around her eyes like make up. In the summer we would freeze water inside two liter bottles and bring them out to the bunnies panting in the heat. September brought relief and thicker coats.
On the fence near the ground was a path tunneled by Bogart the cat before I found him dead in my mother's closet. It went from my yard to Matt Robert's where there were less trees but it was closer to the field so it had more mice. Bogart would bring these mice to our doorstep, sometimes still half breathing, little offerings with big pink ears like paper twitching.
Now Matt Robert would use the hole to poke my ankles with sticks. He'd try to play paper rock scissors but I'd stomp on his hand and yell nuclear warhead I win! Matt Robert was always on my nerves, always breathing down my neck from his seat behind me on the bus, always pulling the bows out of my hair, always looking at me and Janie Causey from his hole in the fence. Olivia Osterhouse swore he gave her a mummified rat. At school he'd make up stories, said he was living in the sewers beneath the streets, thinking about sleeping in the fields once he got friendly enough with the coyotes.
It may have been October or it may have been April. It was a crisp morning--either dew or night time rain making everything wet. I went to feed the bunnies but there was a hole in their pen and only one bunny. The black one with a white stripe had disappeared over night and I ran and told my mother. We searched the entire backyard and found nothing. I don't remember now when I looked, but in the grass on the other side of the fence I found the bunny resting, fur slick, lacking dignity. I reached for her, pulled her back to my yard and held her in my hands. I could feel her skull halved, held together only by skin and fur so soft. I thought maybe she was still breathing, there were two labored gasps but my mother said no, no those are just nerves there's nothing we can do. But the bunny was looking at me, or at the treeline up above. I stroked her little bunny ears now reared, always to be reared.
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When I asked Caroline to marry me she said no so I asked why not and she said because Matt Robert you are weird and so then I asked her what I could do to make her want to marry me and she said well maybe if you grew your hair out real, real long, all the way down your back so you could sit on it so the next time my mom tried to cut my hair I ran outside and hid in the field and she gave up I guess because I didn't get another hair cut for a year until one day I heard Caroline and Janie laughing and I wasn't sure why they were or what could be so funny but I don't know it was one of those things where you just know you're the butt of the joke--I was always the butt of the joke with my outie belly button and my grass stained knees-- so that was it and I went inside and found my mom's scissors and I cut all my hair best I could and it fell to the ground in patches that I wanted to take and shove in Caroline's face, fill her throat with them, block out her eyes with them but I didn't I just fell asleep. The next day up before the sun had completely broke through the storm clouds I was in the back yard looking for salamanders when I found Caroline's bunny rabbit and I'm not sure what happened next-- I remember how calm it was (didn't run, only quivered with its nose and little lungs) and I remember reaching a point where I couldn't stop and couldn't go back I was just pushing it's face into the grass and it's little body struggled against me but my hands were bigger and my face was hot and there were no tears in my eyes and then it just cracked like something so fragile and everything was easy after that.

I circle the house from my room in my sleep. Morning will bring pale blue light and a toe tapped kitchen, floor warm by the pipes and my mother in her robe.

I circle impatient the halls and the yards. I write your initials on book spines, put your name on my thigh before kneeling in prayer.

I circled the block four times to stop smiling five years ago. I didn't want my mother to know you had kissed me. She could smell your hands on mine she could smell your hands in my hair on my waist stop smiling stop smiling.

I circled your lap, your lap, your lap, your lap. I circled your lap when it was the only seat in the house and I knew my bones would hurt your legs and I knew what I felt when it started to rain.

I circled the cents spent and the senseless ways I pick fights and swallow a glass of water waiting beneath a top sheet of ice. The ice hits my teeth and it hurts. The phone doesn't ring and the sun is coming up.

I circled red-cheeked when I couldn't look up. Look up, look up! I didn't look up and you got in your car and you closed the door and you drove home and I laid on the rug in the middle of the room and my mother ran her fingers through my hair.

I circle all day and the paths are run down.

I circle all night above creaking floor boards.

I circle your name in her mouth. I circle your name in her mouth and she swallows it and now it is hers. I circle your name where it used to be mine.

I circle the place where my wrists were so soft.

I circle the place where I am no longer a girl.

I circle my own clumsy hands, dug deep into pockets. My mouth finds no place to sit.

I circle the days and the months since you called. December for you was warmer and bluer. Here the sky is mixed all sleet and gray.

I circled that morning when the horn honked and you squeezed tight, mouth open with sleep and eye lashes too long to be anything but right.

I circle each wave I can see from my window on a train cutting coast. I multiply and divide the distance between each wave, the distance between this island and you.

We circle the zoo and the names and the places we used to. We inch hands closer under sheets in the blue white glow.

You circle your breath in my ear when you lean in and whisper. We say nothing much but it cannot be heard.

I circle oldness and slant the cold. I look for green envelopes. You find red hairs in your car.

We circled the city on a ghost train and settled on the roof of a parking garage. We circled everything but and finished two bottles of water.

We circled Texas and ended with Brooklyn. More bridges, less bar-b-q pits.

I circle your name and swallow it whole.