Summer

We didn’t know how to swim, but we knew
how to swim. Thrashed and violent.

A skull washed up on shore.
Maybe a squirrel, maybe a sign

something was here, gnashed its teeth.
I bit my cousin and got uninvited to mini golf

and my grandmother stopped loving me
from close-up. I found

a sand dollar. A horseshoe crab. Lucky
bones forced smooth by a skeleton

tumbled like rocks. We spit
watermelon seeds from the deck. I’m sorry

for the biting. I’m sorry for the lump in my throat.
I’m sorry my grandfather only remembers me

pickled by the Atlantic Ocean, spellbound
and sunburnt, illuminated

under lights around a mini golf course
we snuck into while my grandmother fed my cousin

ice cream before the sea
swept the legs from under the house

and took all of us with it.

In Response to Underworld by Don DeLillo

In the book, Nick Shay ends up with the home run
ball (coveted, miracle, prize). His wife has an affair 
with his colleague. No spoilers, 

except they stay together. This seems to be the way 
the bruise keeps forming.
I like to think I’d be unforgiving.

That I could leave without answers, no body hanging
from my neck—an albatross thumped
as offering to all my friends

laid bare on the table. I have seen more
soft spots than I care to count. They all know
how the Dodgers felt in 1951. Found out

the enemy was in their hometown this whole time,
lurking at the seaport like a beady-eyed gull.
I like New York: All briny and competitive with itself.

What other city has two football teams
and two baseball teams and hockey teams
and basketball teams? A double or nothing bet

that stopped winning a long time ago.
I like baseball as a metaphor because it’s simple
the way life is simple. 

It’s just the rules making it complicated.
Maybe we all have an obstructed view.
Maybe we’re just waiting for the bomb to go off.

Maybe we’ll stand up when we hear the bat crack.
The Giants and Dodgers both left New York
and so did all my friends. 

There’s a breakup waiting at every airport.
I’m writing this poem for my friend 
about a book I’m reading for her ex-boyfriend. 

She won’t like the book 
and he won’t like the poem 
and I don’t like men who read books and write poems

and miss you so hard they become tragic
seabirds with clipped wings, waiting scavenge 
until you’ve already pulled yourself apart.

Santa Fe, 2021

Maybe it’s time we call it quits, shake hands
like little leaguers after a game shuffling back

to the fence where our parents wait for us
to grow out of it. It’s all-American,

this ragged sentimentality; clinging to driftwood
shaped like fenceposts, Iowa, a blonde girl without opinions.

Maybe the stars in our eyes overgrew with wild.
Maybe we’re all desperate here.

I’m taking a vacation
from daydreams, sweet honey

sunglasses and a roadmap to remorse.
Went 115 the entire way to New Mexico; it’s a miracle

we wound up right side up.
The pulse of this thing has been slowing for months now.

It’s got a death rattle that sounds like a teacup
hitting the floor. 

It feels like rounding all the bases and never going 
home. The third strike sounds less final than you’d think.

Refrain

My end of year review said I lack realistic foresight. I almost went to Albany on purpose. Imagined how you would look all freckles and dry leaves. Your smile, folded down the middle. September is not crisp but brittle, now on the verge of shatter. Planning ahead doesn’t give me satisfaction, just airline credit I’ll never use. She has the beauty mark but I am more Marilyn Monroe and twice as self-conscious. When I say I don’t want to know, I already do.

Subtropical Port Cities

Magnolias line the driveway. 
When they blossom, I am
outside, barefoot, 
waiting to bruise. 

I learned to fear the things more lovely
than me. 
I learned to hate the things I fear. 
I learned to cope is to tame
and to tame is to prune. 

See how the branches fall on concrete. 
How wild things look fragile indoors. 
How tenderness is lost in wilting. 

My mother only smooths my hair
when she is upset with me. 
I read an essay on the aesthetics of
relinquishment, which is to say: 

we want to make things pretty
before we give up on them.