For Erica (Who Will Never Read This)

We met between parenthesis.
A silence just long enough
for a kiss.
It never happened.
The beginning and end
of the New England summer curving
like your hips.
Like your cheeks
on either end of a smile.
I awoke for a second
on your couch
and left what I saw unsaid.
Putting words to that moment
seemed apocryphal.
In all the worlds
where I held your hand,
none were real,
not to anyone else, at least.
I still revisit those nights
in the shadows of a train.
The way you presented
a hoppy beer
with eyes so wide
their parenthesis could
not be distinguished.

Until a blink
washes those memories away.
An aside in the story
perhaps more interesting
but only so
because it isn’t the story.
Would it have been better
if you stayed
and I tried.
Would you have gone
to California
where every day is summer?

I still wonder if you miss
snow and the knit wool
accouterments
that caught falling flakes,
how warm your smile is
on cold nights,
and me. I wonder if you miss me.
I wonder if I exist
in those parenthesis
on either end of your smile,
my name on your lips.

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Friends Without Benefits

In the summer
there is a rush antithetical –
A disordered summoning
from somewhere Other.
A call to the wild.
A returning but a newness.

You are a friend waiting to take my life.
You show me how I am filled
with emptiness, like a vase.
You do it when I wake up,
when I am tired,
when I orgasm –
My face looks just like yours
at that critical moment.

By the time the fall hits
even decay looks pretty.
Even the rotting smell
of death is celebrated with
pumpkin pie and frivolity.
Come sit by me at the feast,
you have earned this privileged space.

But don’t take me yet.
Let me see another summer.

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Fly Butterfly

At the birth of fall
summer birds
dot the spread wings
of our shared pavilion,
our paradise of whispers,
where every quieted
prayer eludes Atlas’ grip.
Enduring muscles
of the god-colossus
shaken by winged thoughts
settling on his titanic
psyche like butterflies
on moss covered rocks.
Regal capes
decorated to mock
their predators fly
in the wind despite
every earthquake its echoed
beating causes across
this wretched world.
A gasp, a grip, flirtatious
mindful breaths of summer
causing the world to slip
on a man’s back.
A butterfly doesn’t care
for earthbound worries,
it flies to heaven on
a violins last note.
Let her drop, my lover
is the wind and in her
arms I am an angel.

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We Are Able

The two drove the end of summer
with an ear to a borrowed cassette,
their sacrifice to a summer
too short and a God too hidden.
The ailing skies over our city
have been interrupted by a tower
taller than the surrounding hills.
Its concrete skin filled
with steel bones
but no heart. The construction workers
weren’t paid enough

to stay. They ride the summer,
let it take them home
when the sun comes up.
Passing signs they don’t
need to read. That they
can’t read.
Tired bones are
discarded onto a bed
as hard as an altar.
The women they know
through marriage
get up, sometimes in disgust
sometimes because they have to
in order to make the other

half of their living. Her smoke
curls into an ailing sky,
the dome that unites
the 24 hour barber shops
with the Greek Orthodox
Church, the veterans on
Park Street’s corner with
the well dressed

college students driving
in a beat up old green
car. In New England
such moments are short
lived. The jealous winter’s
sacrifice is necessary
but insufficient.
Our curled jaw bones
clutching
Lucky Strike
burnt offerings,
disposable straws,
addictive lyrics.

The two let the city
flow past open windows,
their music comingling
with the streets it
was born in. As if
it had never left.
They would reunite
again, in the mind
of their creator,
if they were able.
The best they can
do is echo off
concrete skin
and teach our city
three desperate words:
we are Able.

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Redacted – For WL

Feet tapping. Fingers failing
to shuffle tiles on a rack.
Eyes squinting, lips pressing
around glass, his next attack
a five letter word meaning
“a forceful verbal assault”
drops like a bomb on Bletchley town.
Another smooth drink goes down.

His mind, endlessly decoding
scrabbled simulacrums
on the old torn chair
he found forgotten.
It perpetually overlooked
a game board and a dictionary.
Summer and youth
mixing like mint and brandy
with a little ice.

He liked the chair
because it was textured
like music. It had a meaning.
It needed interpretation
and more
illumination
than the towering lamp could give.
Some veteran had sold it to him
because of memories
of World War II. It was a solid
lamp that towered toward a heaven
out of reach by the small
Scrabble board. Like Babel
for wooden tiles.

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