left uninspired by the crust of railroad earth

04.19.2026 -

this is just a mirror,
and this is just a desk, this is just a car crash,
just as this is your face like Greco-Roman architecture.
don’t close your notebook; look, the leaves that fell
once are rebuilding themselves (while the columns
collapse and your bluesman father strums some old Fender).
on the sidewalk, see, we are all dying here!
we just know when to lose, to let go, to buy, to sell,
to realize that the mountains we've made mean
that we may never breathe again. remember
how you want this to be a poem
instead of a tragedy,
remember.

04.20.2026 - monotonous thoughts in grief

you say that you wish
you could make this call from an apartment
in San Diego, but instead you are making this call
from a rental car in Boston.

you have seen a license plate from every state
except Delaware, and you make it a habit to tally them
all in your notebook. maybe, you think,
you could go to Nebraska, or some small town in Maine,
but you keep finding yourself playing eight-bar blues
on Fortieth and singing songs of missed
connections.

your calendar
still reads January, although it is April,
and tomorrow, you will go to your doctor's appointment
instead of your wife's baby shower (and you don't tell anyone
that it's because there is no baby anymore;
you can't stand how it feels on your lips).

you think of many things that can't be said
aloud, but you never remember to write them into poems.
you bought a plane ticket impulsively and canceled it
last minute because it turns out there
isn't anything left for you in California now.

Spoiler

grief is weird. I can't see right through it no matter how I strain my eyes. I told myself I'd never write poetry about it, though, but here I am.

04.21.2026 -

winters here are far too heavy with snow,
make me feel sick inside.

I will always remember you
beneath your comforter,
and I will always hate that I remember it.
I am terrified of you, the girl who locks
her doors and loves her mother without realizing
what it is that she is doing.

Spoiler

yesterday's poem. had a crazy fever, so this sucks!

04.22.2026 - Queens, New York City, New York

you may meet your quota,
but you’ll never meet your end,
racing through the stucco in the room
Gabriel rented before he overdosed,
the ridiculous ambivalence seeping
through your pores.
this is desperation:
looking without seeing
when every side street and roadside
looks like the devil's territory.
it is what you sound like when you speak
all your sentences backwards.
it is like staring at varicose veins
underwater, watching skyscrapers blur
into a baby's fingers.

04.23.2026 - date night / John Cassavetes

around 8:00, I had slowed you
to a halt near the crosswalk on Montauk between
Coastal and Le Soir to fix the scar-tissue on your chin.
you were a first trip to New York City, or
a perfect view of the cosmos from that clearing
behind your childhood home.
just an hour prior, our retinas crawled out
of the desert, bathing in a Cinecenta screen.
I was agape and fawning, hyperawake, paranoid,
body pulsing, feeling loose, depersonalized:
"did you hate it?" I couldn't help but stare at you
licking your lips clean of tinted chapstick.

"even
worse, I enjoyed it."

04.24.2026 - and she was always down

we don't love
our bodies properly.
mostly we just listen to the sky
as it changes colours over the river
outside of our bedroom window.
I don't like thinking about the way
my body looks like next to yours.
there is so much flesh on mine
that I'm not sure who it belongs to,
or where it is supposed to go.

the sun mixes with your face
to reveal just enough
of your tongue and your teeth.

04.25.2026 -

the way a body is:
it’s a road, like this one that I’m on now, visiting you.
the trees stretch out the way your body does atop my bed.
when we walk, I'm jealous of your calves.
when we walk, I want to pick you a cactus.
it's like we're playing ring-around-the-rosy all over again,
standing and circling on dirt roads outside of white houses
covered in pink flowers. we're three years old,
and so far, nobody we know has died.

04.26.2026 - Gabriel listens to Talking Heads / losing friends

in November, before he died,
Gabriel and I are in a parking lot
and he doesn't know my voice, a voice sounding
like broken jewelry. for my birthday, he gave me
a bracelet he found in his mother’s bedroom
and it broke two days later,
beneath a dimly lit streetlamp.

somewhere in the middle of a sidewalk,
somewhere near the east river, I am crying
water from littered water bottles.
nobody sees me crying (or: it’s all a dream,
and this dream happens over and over again,
cyclical, like the way my parents used to sleep,
used to hold each other).

his funeral is back home.
I fly there and my ears won’t stop popping,
like a mountain, like digestion. when I saw you
in between sheets cotton like his vintage t-shirts,
I forget that I am no longer in the city.

Spoiler

I don't really remember much about him, but I remember how it felt to know him. really cool guy. hope he's okay wherever he is, if there is some place after death, and I'm sure I'll hear all about it one day.

04.27.2026 - somewhere in Ithaca, New York

often, I fear I am too young
and tender to survive in this world.
moments like these - sitting, reading, basking
in a cafe - can make me overwhelmed.
I have to drop everything and sit, elbows propped,
palms cupping a numb face, to slow the rush
of emotions pulsating through me.
you say I am too big a fool, fall in love too easily
with everything. there is a synchronized feeling to you now,
one of exclusivity, that suggests a solitary reconnaissance.
let's couchsurf across the country, drop by without notice,
run broke, read your favourite books:
poetry and the autobiography of Malcolm X.

04.28.2026 - émigrés

we are the kinds of people
who love first (maybe against mountains,
landscapes, mountainscapes), fingerpick cherries,
cherrypick at dawn, paint birds,
sing the blues in public.
I keep writing evenings by
the waterfront with candlelight
Freemasons paving the boardwalk,
but it always falls out of my Kaddish hands
and into pages of your notebook.
the wood on your bare feet is unseasonably cold,
and looking at yourself in the mirror
is like reading Tolstoy in Russian
for the first time. it’s amazing, you think,
how many things you haven't touched
yet.

Spoiler

actually wrote this on paper for the first time in... ever? was dated for yesterday, so it's technically free game!

04.29.2026 - musicology (and you)

in c sharp minor,
you're pulling on your wrinkled shirt,
slight blue pinstripes clawing at your shoulders,
breath escaping your mouth
dolente dolcissimo,
hands slowly buttoning from the top down,
fingertips reading beatific notation
as if each callus could savour it but once.

04.30.2026 - Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

curse the cigarette between
your index and middle finger;
I have always been farther away than
the last moment spoken between and the label,
yet there is nowhere beyond my mind that
I know how to reach.

once in a dream,
I was in this graveyard like crayon realism
strobe lights, with tombstones all-round
and the faint-buzz of outside. now,
I sit alone at my computer and whine to you
in stream-of-conscious prose because
I would otherwise be fighting
coughing fits.

this is your hypothesis:
hiding in hyperspace, sun-drenched
sandwiches in our photos of July together,
overlooking the crosses of Yates and Blanshard
with European Gothic architecture
poking heedlessly into the open blue.

04.30.2026 -

that spring I did go crazy:
like a growing tire tear,
the water waning sand in the desert of your bones.
this season, a second skin for dead things,
you litter me with the stench of sweat
and your mother’s geraniums.