Year of the Rabbit

I.

My sneakers keep sticking to the floor,
dry puddles of gin.
I slept in my sneakers,
kissless but content.
Welcome, two-thousand and eleven.
Make yourself at home.

Remembering scenes from my dream
which took place all on this block.
First, with my family at the coffee shop
and the adjunct poetry professor
who made a pass at my mother
but wouldn’t own up to his transgression.
I got pissed. Stormed away flipping tables,
launching coffee cups across the counter,
tearing sugar packets. Professor chased me
down and pinned the blame on my chest,
I’m just acting on my instincts. Don’t hold
it against me. Depressing repression.

So I left. In the street I found Amy,
home from Sweden, with her host family.
They were all dressed in turtlenecks and tweed,
geniuses obviously, unpacking their van into the apartment
I was currently asleep in. Amy told me jokes
and stories, but her words were too accented, unintelligible.
It was raining again.

Beside me, this time awake, this time reality,
James rubs his cherub eyes, pulls at his goatee.
Six times today he’ll apologize for all of last night’s
yelling, even though that’s not the case. I suppose
he doesn’t remember confiding in myself
and Allison, his heartbreak. We tried to tell him
the bitterness means the love was real, but how
do you go back to dancing after losing four-years’
worth of friendship?

Slowly, Allison would say.

In a new city, James thinks.

Christian, on the couch, won’t stop shouting.
He rubs soap on his face, scrubbing off
the insults from last night. It’s all blurred,
but he remembers every line from late-nineties
tv shows, cancelled of course, in their prime.

I’m still sleepy. Kissless and content.
My sister and I vowed (resolved)
to breathe deeper like the turtles,
but I don’t want to live to be three-hundred.


I.

At brunch, Apt. 138, the biscuits come swimming
in sausage gravy, flakey and warm. Ryan
is too hung over to eat.

Pretending to listen and laughing occasionally,
I can’t seem to remember last New Years.
Babysitting, I think. Cutting up catalogues
for stock images, ideas with an author.

Memory is wasted on me. I might as well
have been born today, and perhaps I am,
for my head is shaved nearly bald
and by my own hand.

It wasn’t neat and
it wasn’t cathartic.
I just look serious. I am serious but
today I’ve got nothing to say,
so I sit, sternly quite, at brunch, completely,
self, absorbed.

If I go home, curl up in bed,
I could spend all of today reviewing
yesterday, from midnight to morning.
I bet I could get all the details, the big ones,
at least. Go on that way for the next twenty-one
years. Get my life back under my belt
before continuing on in this fashion.

But where’s the coffee? The waiter promised
unlimited refills on the house blend,
which I find crisp and oaky.


We should leave now. We’re been intolerable
guests in Jen’s house too long, and if we start reminiscing
there’s no going back.

Please, open the window. It still smells
like last year in here. I need a breeze.
I need to go home.

I.

The A train is running express. We just flew
by Franklin Ave, my sister’s place. Let’s ride
this to the end. Rockaway, I’ve never been
but remember from that Ramones song,
so much faster than the teenage anthem
in my ears today.

Another sip of coconut water with lime,
although it could very well be lime water
with coconut for all I know.

The man across the aisle
just talked the bootlegger
down to ten dollars for Harry Potter
and the Deathly Hallows Part I.
A good deal, I should say,
and he seems proud of himself.
No guarantees.

The train slopes up
out the earth, onto elevated tracks
like a domesticated rollercoaster.
It’s exhilarating because the streets are empty
and houses begin to shrink, a bit,
like the beginning of a take-off.
We’re tied, balloon-stringed,
to the ground, to the cemetery,
stretching from here into the imminent
ocean, so that some bones just settle, sink,
calcify further into coral reefs.
There’s no way around that one.

For a minute, Richard’s in my mind.
God, I hope he wasn’t on a rooftop last night.
The romance of an apocalyptic dawn,
and such round numbers!
There’d be nothing left if he leapt.
Right now it’s just coffee and waiting
to hear him sing again.

I get off the train too early,
Broad Chanel, but the coast
is so close. I’m almost sprinting
now, through this tiny dreaming town,
turning left and left again. There it is!
Right across the street. The rocks
are cold, covered with ice, beneath me,
and swans are swimming circles
around the flotilla of icebergs.

I’ve given up on being concise
or aiming for poignancy.
Maybe shoot for purposelessness
but what’s the point?

This must be the bay
because out there, miles into the distance,
as far as I can see
there’s an outline of something
jutting into the sky, twisted
and longing.
Either a forest or a city
covered in snow and faint
on the horizon.