das kind isst und küsst sein geist

martha stands in the west side in the black morning

and says to her children that they are better. you are better, maria,

you were born before justin and after helen, though you taught

them both how to float in the community pool. you have private experiences and they’re in those back-lit reams, that have by justice been conferred on my children and on the children of other women like me. but maria

picks her nose in the afterschool program and parts

her legs to reveal leopard flash cotton nook, her teacher fondles

his guitar and says callously girl zip it, zip zip it or i’ll send you back.

martha folds her purse between her knees and my children are better, she says to nobody. they have feelings that are like nobody's, i call them down 

into the basement and give them gatorades, i cradle their gatorades

and ask them to please never think i am old, or to love, or be anything, and again to not think i am old. i send them upstairs and they go to wisconsin with college

boyfriends, they tan. they look at this and look at that when i tell them to. i gather them in the black western and the lonely idea that i am real--

they drive into depth of field and strike rocks on the sides of cars not theirs and if i could get them back in me i would-- if nobody understands the want.

but that you would read instead, placing useful

panels against other panels of wood, and that you would be so elegant and choose when to be gentle, though gentle you are not you are not the dove. but that you would speak to me through others

and to them through my openings. i guess who cares

cities gather into themselves just as i have feebly since leaving,

they erect centers they go on to fill with bulbs and then

congratulate themselves. this beam upholds what holds

what paint paints things white.

When we were in Berlin, I let my leg hair grow out and you said you hated it but I did it anyway. I smoked long cigarettes that are no longer manufactured in Europe, outlawed in the United States. I asked you about if I could get in trouble on the streets for smoking these and you said no of course not what cop would be voiced in cigarette laws.

"Voiced" you said.

When we were in Pondicherry, India and every bright color. The dogs with mange, tumors riding sidesaddled against their paunches, that one photo of you smiling because that is what we are taught to do, smile in every picture, you are leaning against a manilla wall with the dog on your left and you are smiling.

What teeth do you have. I try to pull mine out when I look in the mirror anyway. How we hold all of them hostage. Open wide do you see do you see, remarkable.

I tried to open the door but to touch meant a blister or two, so hot. Does this mean fire. When a fire consumed all of my possessions, what do you hold dear anymore. My love, you have left me

again and again. What prostitute what envy. My love did you ever love me at all did you.

When we were sitting with our backs to the wind on Lake Michigan and you recite an Ashbery poem you say "Bombed out of our minds, I think/The way here is too close, too packed/With surges of feeling. It can't be" and we watch a sunset turn. December, our love has faded. I am pacing the hallway of a grand suite hotel in the city of your youth and I am saying no to you, no no time to go back. You take a picture out of the wall of windows, a caption that reads "this city looking like another city" which means what of characteristics and time. We are in love so take me to your hometown, show me around. I forgot what it is like to take your clothes off with someone that loves you. How to make love like an animal. It's easy you say.

everything i touch i touch online. i touch the thing that tells me to go to it and be with it. the thing that is underlined. on nostrand i touch the foods drawn on the sides of delis. i touch the paper cups. the semicircle tables are green like the hats and swimming.

i really love to stare at things. i stare at them by touching them.

is it pink-pink or tink-tink when you touch it? it is something like that. all touching happens in darkness.

my baby holds me tight and says i am like johannes kepler, because i have issues.

my baby loads film into his camera and says he thinks he is losing his hair, or will. he always says this or that about what will happen to his hair. i walk over and grab it all in my hand like a stalk of wheat. i kiss it in my hand.

it takes the courage of your heavy and wood grain heart to even say good morning to the same people every day. you don’t know them at all but you must say good morning to them daily. as if they were all your husbands in bed next to you, staring at you in disbelief until you say good morning.

sometimes it’s better to hide in the library, where you can hiss at people when they try to talk to you, like a silent reading creature.

sometimes it's better to say of course “a tree grows in brooklyn.” because trees grow everywhere.

sometimes it's better to say art is generally bad. that is to say good or even phenomenal without exceptions.

there are millions of threads coursing through my pink pajama.

you laugh. you don’t toss your head back like you used to-- just a mirage, you chuckle while you find the house keys in your gringo tote.

you lean back in front of the magritte. the one magritte—there’s never more than one—this is impossible, until i finally leave the yellow crescent i’ve made for myself and given away—until i have a room and shoes to stand in and less money and this one window facing some manner of greens. but why should i complain? houses are burning down on the internet.

sometimes i wish it was still that metallic evening i walked between the yellow buildings of old nice, that were for their own reasons faithful and silent—and their sentences much longer— they were basically tall lanterns, and it seemed then that the world had only women in it. but france is like that.

but now i’m counting pink threads in my room and outside it’s the same old brooklyn i know: “nobody understands me!”

well good, i want to be here, counting.  the process is called artificial selection: an accumulation of favorable tempers—this is the thesis of my family. we’ve been fingering the blinds for centuries and our fossil record is evinced in a billion small fruit bowls and marble ashtrays, atomic designs, the stuff of life was in the garden outside. the living function joined and made a collective sensation—that's what we do. sex and the greens we are specific to.

i just forget, baby! i haven’t any notes by which to document you. i watch you trace my shadow like it's a family tree, swept into microfiche, my little ten seconds—for closer perusal. it’s like lampreys, your relative architecture, linguistics, structures. i count the threads and listen to neighbors arguing outside about parking spaces. 

joy and illych are twins. their mother died one year after their birth. now they are five. or ten, combined. i try to read them a book but they keep interrupting me to say, "our mom is dead our mom is dead." in the corner their father sleeps with smartphone in hand and wakes up a little to nod his gray head in response, "yes it is true," he mumbles, "she is." 

#2 (cont)

Trevor insists with his head in his hands and the gun in his lap that he never wanted to even go inside the house in the first place

Hostage #2

I pull my legs underneath me and it feels like I have never pulled my legs underneath myself before. What inner ear infection, how the pain pulses into your throat into the sternum snipped and resewn so many times but no one ever loses count. Vertigo and I say to Trevor, don't hit him with a crowbar, don't hit him with a tire iron. There is a news report and it says hours later that you hit him on the arm. Bruce Lee's flow-like-water, bruises on both. Children upstairs. Is that the hardest part, there were children upstairs sleeping. If you ask me, I don't think they were asleep, although. In a university in a time far away one of these children will write an essay in their very first English composition class that they are ill-prepared for about this night, their parents being hog-tied and poorly knotted backs against each other worrying about the last time they fucked because that is what you do when your life is about to end, worry about the last time you fucked your wife.

hostage #1

We can pretend there are no hostages and then there are and we don't understand how.

Early morning and the next day within a four hours. How a day can be defined in four hours.

Four hours and 37 minutes. We look at a photograph and it is 1999 and we say how did so much time pass and also that looks like it was in 1999. Remember you wore wedge heeled shoes and had a penis haircut with bleach blonde hair. I wonder if your vein pops out of your forehead when you laugh now in adulthood.

Trevor enters the room says no one can leave.

Trevor enters the room and says I'm sorry you guys but you can't go anywhere.

I learned how to fire a gun when I was 28 years old. I had no idea how hard it was to pull a trigger until then. My first automatic rifle I cocked my shoulder backwards, and then. Five pulled muscles, and then. When I lie in bed, I can't turn to one side. Before I knew anything, I knew the side of the bed you preferred over others.

Young parents.

The begging of young parents is a different kind of begging. Trevor, we have to get home. We have to go home. Will you let us go. When can we get home. Are you going to shoot us.

No, of course not, we hear Trevor say. You can't leave, though.