Ode to Brighton Beach and a New Friendship

Right now I am sitting in my purple-hued ceilinged room while staring at wooden panels older than the Depression-era house itself.
But I am not here.
I am eight hundred and six miles away, perched above a shoreline full of a people whose age is always visible only in their eyes, whose bodies feel no cold where they are now, whose candies have decorations of lobsters, polar bears, and lovers in recline. This place is a shore, somewhere between solid and liquid, somewhere between where I am now and where I want to be.
This place has food so thick your ribs expand by two inches after every meal, your mouth doesn’t even understand how to comprehend the warmth it can feel, your mind can often lose itself in Baltika and a special type of water known as vodka (only drank when eating so one can drink more).
O, klassno! This mysterious place has a magnetic hold on not only me but those that live there, those little Odessits, who roam the streets as if years did not exist except in the creases of skin on their faces. They seem so sharp, quick, cutting if you can not see past the surface but within the creases slumber memories of lives interrupted by terror, by suffering, by joys, by new and old. Even the young, whose exteriors seem like any other with hair that burns like sulfur and eyes that have known what lies in the older creases; they too have a particular magnetism. Even on the beach, a couple frolics in Siberian temperatures, splashing one another until the young man slings his arms around her from behind, winding his hands around her waist and resting his head along her collarbone only to say, “Let’s go home.”
I only have one concrete reminder of Brighton Beach with me, a small morsel of a memory wound in the lines of a clam shell. Each line holds an image: a set of eyes, bright blonde hair, velour track-suits, a flaky pastry, bins upon bins of various flavors of Turkish delights, hearty meals of soup and bread and that special water, sand under my fingernails, and a cold ocean nibbling at my feet. All of these things are wonderful on their own, that much is true. But honestly, they’re all wonderful because they happened on that day, in that month, and with me and you.

I am stepping on crackers

I.
whole grain crackers laying on my floor after a night
where a morning
blends into a sky
that i can't differentiate from
anything.
see what harold washington did, just a handful of years ago?
(imagine what those years must feel like)
(do they writhe or wiggle)
(dance, slip, sleep, wait)
imagine what those years can do.

II.
In order to be very sure, tomorrow I shall take you
to a room
twice as large.
If you can convert the hay into gold, I shall marry you;
if not,
you will be destroyed.

III.
Take these two dollars and buy me a gift
for her, so she won't be destroyed
so she won't try any funny business
so she won't say no when she should say yes
because i love her.
can't you see that?

IV.
I promise, I won't say no.

Cylinder

Our house is old and new and gray but not too used because if it were, we could not be able to find dust mites under the escutcheon that still run around in a circle if you blow in just the right direction.

Our house is ours because we make sure of it, watering the greens and pulling the yellows - admiring our neighbor for his brash choice of a peach tree(even if it attracts more locals than ever).

Our house isn't here anymore because the foundation had a crack from years before and I could not deal with losing another doorway to lean against so we're outside again but without any fresh lemons.

Your house is new. I wish I could see it.

Isograft

Please tell me how a moon can tap along to a
symphony while you are poking at my toe-nail-polish and claiming how much need
and want
are inside of me.

Please tell me how your skin feels more ideal than an identical pair of eyes in an el car at seven-oh-three in the morning
when i just put away your letter.

Please tell me how to recreate this without harmonizing too much or overcooking this
prime cut of
cavil tendency so that one day i can be proud of calling your face my own.

We started in Tahiti

eating blue crabs shaken loose from a coconut tree
before cascading down the pelagic trail to where a formal sir shook his head to remind us that dinner reservations need to be made at least two to three weeks in advance.
Where to go after that we didn't know so we scratched our faces, popped,and dove back in.

this time the trail took us north back to what we knew: mud, sticks, shallow. We tried to swim but our feet stuck together, turning us into creatures not far from the blue men of the Minch but honestly how many times can I lose myself in this aquatic form of thought?

We keep starting and turning but the mud sticks and keeps us stuck there with our ankles wound together and our feet bare, letting us stay still until i fell left and he felt right. Say it again in polish, the last sound will rhyme and we'll all be fine.

Because without her

I would have never seen the green eyes of a giantess
or the insanity of a Russian beach
or know the simple delicacy that lies between four day old sheets and a frayed phone cord
or how far I am now from who I was when she would still wear black pants.

Because without her these questions wouldn't be asked,
wouldn't be thought, wouldn't be here
but more so because without her, i would still be inside of a small cave
with a gnarled claw as my left hand and a baggie of potpourri for my right.

Because without her, I'm still without him and right now there is nothing aside from
dead words and fake heat, neither of which are right for me.

Gideon

The upstairs has wings for rent
[only if the children say so]
but when they let you be warned that a WWII bomb just exploded
even though they're found all the time.

All I've ever found have been granite leftover landscaping from a picky neighbor
or a leftover mattress from a lazy neighbor.
Not that I'm saying which is better to find
but at least I've got a sense of people leaving and forgetting
the two things they don't need
but didn't make.

Make sure the archangel doesn't see because he'll yell at the children,
he'll yell at me,
he'll take all our leftover decades and put them inside that hydrogen atom.
Not because you asked but because you asked twice while wearing his old golden ephod.

Reasons:
consistency, ability, sweet futures, his dome, I don't want all the others.
This is my constant replacement, the advice I can't give to view all memories and comfort.
We'll be worse off.
Last week when I was his hair, it felt the same but I called out on how much being is wrong to deserve some special soul. Answer the topic that hurt the word on my feeble stead, a flood of hours. He just didn't know what to do, even now.
It wells in my clarity when I think of other people knowing how a person is supposed to react when I'm too busy asking if one exists. Is it just healthy levels of whatever allows them to leap?
Of course, I'm unfair to sit here outing the bad but I need to
I need to when I think of what I've done or haven't done or really have to do.

It is only sound but potential
beekeeping masks and the smell
of that thing
keep me away.

He was only four feet down,
layered between wood
dust
wood
paint,
a floor and separating beam.

I've been using cabbage leaves,
escaping a creation
to enjoy lightness/dryness.
See what I did just there, with that one hit
I made my own uncertainty into what I really needed

angels

Telling about grass and what is underneath even though seeing through skin is easier when the day is full of mornings and wake up conference calls to you.

I can not just say what I want to say here because it wouldn't be worth reading in that way, a little mystery may just be what we need to figure out exactly what makes an ice cream scooper work, work and not fail, work and not fail.

Four contessas counting the nights and corners, making sure all four are here so the circles are full, perfect, round, now.

So no, I won't tell you what it means to be a member and no you can not join her.

Excerpt

I sat next to Aunt Bridie and Uncle Tom. Nana was propped up by a hospital bed and piles of pillows, looking at all of us sitting in a row.
She had asked me what I was going to do for the summer, if I was still nannying or looking for work. I explained that I wanted to do a few different things but no job lined up. She nodded. She looked out the window and realized it was still raining, harder than yesterday she added on.
“You know, your Mom said you were working in the south loop, huh, Maureen?”
“Yeah, Nana. I still sit for them occasionally, just whenever the little guy gets sick or the dad is out of town on business.”
“That area used to be a whole lot different. That was one of the first jobs Mick and I ever did together. Most of the time I stayed in the office, yknow, doing what had to be done. But it was raining so he invited me out, said he only had to check one thing to make sure it wasn’t caving in from the downpour. We pulled up at about, oh, 12th and Halsted. It wasn’t coming down anymore but the sun wasn’t out, sorta dark but not night kind of dark, just an in-between state.
“Anyway, we were sitting in our little red truck when he asked me, ‘So you wanna go out?’ I looked at him until we heard a few rats underneath the truck, squeakin’ and splashin’. I told him no, let’s just stay here, we can have another cigarette. So that’s what we did for about an hour, just smoked cigarettes in our red truck while the rats ran around us.”

Tricky versus Clever

!.

A girl once told me that beautiful was a cop out and I wanted to write about it but for months, I could only think about how wrong it was and say the word outloud.
Be you tea full.
Separate and together, bringing it back and whole and apart and whole and again: let me tell you how it went.

@.

It has been five months now and I still haven't wrote back, I would be sorry but our conversations held an understanding of how I am with letters and you gave me two.
two!
(although to be quite honest, i was flattered. they've been in my purple bag ever since and on the one night when i worked late) you tried me.

though, reader

Two people entered the room. Not then but one time.
They each carried a bag with contents.
I don't know what they had with them or
if we could figure it out.
I do know that I used to call the one Sin of some kind
before I
made a makebelieveshow.

They were not in the show so I don't know why I am telling you about them, you my reader who has the keen ability to flip and reverse ti tuoba gnikniht neve tuohtiw.
I know that you're with me on this because
you told me so, you said
dearly departed, we gather here today to remember not only a small person but
larger, nicer
(though not quite as nice as we all once were)
You don't remember that though, reader, because not only were you
not there
you weren't here for it either.

I've been better, she said after a night with cream sticks and colder drinking
while her sister watched out the kitchen window and we ran around a town we once were mayors of, older then before now where we feel small and just wait for the next three weeks to come.