Along with our tickets, the man at the counter hands us two cherry-red ponchos, their plastic so thin as to be see-through. I pull mine on and we giggle as I spread my arms wide to demonstrate the corpulence of the thin plastic sheeting, a silly sight rendered hilarious by the mezcal margaritas we downed at lunch.

On the day I contemplated dropping out of Cornell, I stood at the edge of a bridge and pondered all the overdue papers I would never have to complete and the burden of student debt I would be free from if I ceased to exist. I peered at the jagged rocks below, dusted with snow.

“I smelled gas in my kitchen,” Elizabeth yelled. “I’m really scared.” I turned around from my mailbox in the courtyard and realized she was talking to me. My downstairs neighbor Sergei’s door was open. I looked into the shadows of his living room.

Am I a creature of cocoon?
I pupate myself and wait for later.

When you are ready, you will scrape the velvet from your antlers. The hours of scratch and file will be hot and unforgiving; the world will not be kind to you today.

why do drug names sound like wizards?
my son asks one of his questions that answers
itself and he catches me up on science:

in a shroud of quiet
cloudy as paper
and cold as well water

We were both shopping at Trader Joe’s, Swan
and Grant, around 3 on Tuesday, the 16th.
You were a vision, a snow white blonde…

They are sweet
red and green, heavy on our vines,
plump fruit dropping
like soft stones, ripe for the press

I appeared in this body
as a single note, a 440 A, soon
arpeggiating into a mockingbird’s
verdant melody, the buzzchirp

For only a moment it seems
there is movement at the bottom
of the page, as if an insect
is crawling across the paper

My mother shaved her head and performed an ugliness in the kitchen, an exorcism of Cunt and Bitch. She heard our shadows say Ugly and committed to form.

At twenty I practice unlearning her body.
The same black roots spilling
down my scalp. The same hand over
my mouth except it is my hand

I could not / bring myself / to rob graves
I quietly gave up / on my own / extremities
starved / for attention / numb, then life-
less & yes / & last / the heart

If you slip
a bowl beneath
a hen to catch
an egg as it slips

I always thought of a cold storage
in space where souls could hibernate
take their own re-birthing time
to find another suitable body.

I’ll trudge off the wet field with the team, hand
my gear to the equipment manager, peel off my
sweaty uniform, and lose myself in the mayhem
of the post-game locker room

Yes, I dream of monsters,
but they’re not what you think.
Instead of slobbering fangs,
they give me Lucky Charms,

Driving after rain through time’s
morning, the streets wept clean. Damp-
stained bark of the sycamores:
cicatrix of what stays.

I did not know
that words
might lift themselves
from their paper perches

Butter and olive oil sizzled in my ears. The aroma of lemon and capers filled my nostrils. And all I could see was the face of a handsome man in his late twenties with a bit of facial scruff and kind blue eyes smiling back at me. I opened my mouth to taste the chicken piccata from the end of the fork that he held out in front of him and promptly bolted upright in bed.

“What you need is a good woman,” Esther says, placing a bowl of stuffed cabbage in front of me. Today is Monday, and Monday means chopped meat. Esther is a woman of rituals. She is a Litvak and makes a tomato sauce instead of the white sauce and raisins we use—used to use—in Galitzia.

An old man lives over down there, near the river, where they’ve gone and put up all those new apartments or condominiums or whatever you want to call them, high-rises climbing to the clouds to block the sun from this insignificant part of the world, on what once upon a time had been open prairie, then farmland…

Sundays were days of worship for some families, football for others. For me, it meant a visit to my grandparents where I would watch cartoons on the shag carpet with a cereal-filled stomach. After his morning paper, toast and smoke, my grandfather would join me.