if I were some body, I would call new york
and vomit all
my happy-hour alcohol
inside that earwaxed
manhole,
wobble around the streets
beside a dog
wagging its tail
until a pair of arms
grabs me holds me
on a greasy leather couch,
the host hands me back
my water.
my head
snaps.
they say,
I am leaking:
rabid froths
melting liquid tears
and sweat.
my mouth
flapping drunken
chicken wings,
winding
one turn
then another and another.
a confession
spirals into madness
wailing and calling
for my mother
sleeping somewhere
in her grave.
she, indeed,
can hear you.
if only,
in a second-hand 99-cent store in Queens,
she
could rent a mannequin for a day,
or simply —
have her body back.
where is God
when you need
a body to have
so badly? before
your own body
betrays you, it will
perform its
childhood play of
dismembering
and this remembering:
a toy doll hibernating in a cave,
folding into its weight as it shrinks
into mold
beside
mother’s old clothes.
while the drool dropping in my mouth is tapping morse code
I watch midnight walking on tiptoe
around the fountain
in Washington Square Park.
I watch the piano player sing Sinatra
through my camera. I filmed her
earlier that day
While a child gave birth
through his mouth
an archipelago of bubbles
And these bubbles know well how
to live in a moment:
their brief life, a total view of the park,
But once they exhale, they expire.
Tonight, evening is the enclosed fence
surrounding the park.
Dead silence exhausting the air —
each breath and swollen red-eyed bronchiole
vacuumed out from my wing-torn lungs.
What should I feel but I sat on a bench
beside a mcdonald’s burger and a plastic soft drink cup
left for ghost pigeons to peck.
The straw points to the direction
of light flickering in one of the buildings
outside the park.
I am reading morse code,
each blink in the eye a dot, a dash, then pause
but it turns out to contain — a
tap, tap, tap
inside my ears shares
the same beat of lullaby
my mother
sang to me
before she was lost.
hope is another brooklyn poem
that is broken
and unbroken,
a pair of old
reeboks brokers
a deal with the pave-
ment for a square foot
of space. each step, a
root gripping, stamping
dashes of rubber ants
burning and crease is
a personal history of
mud, tissue paper,
and shit. red brick
walls —the brooklyn
of brooklyns —have
broken windows
and have broken
windows. the
fountain pen piss
on doorstep is a
signed autograph:
the name of hope:
meaning, refusal
of erasure, meaning,
the smell bites back.
the trail will skunk
the whole block,
and not even for a
blocked sinus or
strong old spice
can drag a body
out from its graffiti,
this portrait of dust
zoomed in by a
periscope is a
pimpled whirlpool
pimping on the
east river, sucking
boats en route
to staten island
and all frustrations
cussing in it contained
inside a cold january
face. but ambition
is not a grain of rice
easily surrendering to
the kitchen sink. it’s
strands of green hair
spooled into furball,
clogging the piping,
until the tap will tap
out and say uncle. say
what are you swearing:
winter coat covers a
a song, a body rub
strumming muscle
into warm mulled
wine over a burning
garbage can, fueled by
time capsule letters,
each word on paper
is hot coal of tears
jumping from magma,
coalescing into the
streets as tumble-
weed, knocking out
every brick building
and tooth. centripetal
force from a tumbler
pulls together the
dust, dirt, shit, fall
leaf, lost penny
into a collective
echo, a shattering
of every glass office
and eyeglass, pores
sweating a scream,
the unpaid bills, the
screeching customer,
the scamming boss, the
scab-crusted alleys,
the gross excess of
money, the glass sky-
scraper a border wall
fencing the borough,
and grass exhumes
the skull of hope,
hope her name,
beautiful to invoke,
but hope’s a dead name,
spray-painted on pavements
and benches by pigeon
excrement, urban legend,
prison sentence is
fear from the children
after combing hope’s
hair claw and rib cage
from a sandbox while
a pigeon takes hope’s eye-
ball off her smile.
here in brooklyn, hope
was any other new
yorker: riding the sub-
way every day to work
after snoozing the alarm
for the nth time. even
after waiting tables,
evening acting classes, the
auditions, the unpaid off-
off broadway roles, the
side hustles, and extra
shifts to cover rent and
diapers, hope throws bricks
until broken windows
reflect the image of
repetition, breaking, crying,
shaking milk formula with
raised fist. what else could
hope break but
hope: her skin, her
muscle, organ, brain,
her bone, mother,
broken until there is
nothing left to break.
