by Jana Prikryl
what every semaphore was for. Almost time
for a weekly share from the nation’s
remaining newspaper.
It not only beamed to the backs of our eyes
but was beamed there by us, optic nerves
the sites where all the news occurred.
Stoic
Upper East Side’s where you want to cultivate friends,
its mediocre restaurants won’t close
or send the delivery guys home on their bikes
with the hand muffs giant papier-mâché
ear horns no use against hurricanes;
you hear them coming but can’t endure them.
In this city friendship’s
the main mode of disaster prep.
Basements and subbasements busy
with boilers switching on and off
inflicting real wear-and-tear on just
the effort of getting in touch
with those you don’t want to lose touch with yet.
I never saw the guys draw
their bikes through the subway’s
emergency doors so they must steer
those ear horns deep into the outer boroughs
to sleep a few hours before pedaling back
to one of the ten or twelve downtowns
to do it over. Those the zips
real friends should have, and to be real
be necessary. Everyone has the one or two
friends from back then whose points
can afford to equal zero,
though not perhaps without some penalty
being inflicted all the time,
nobody needs more like you, so then
I found it in myself because I had to,
the one or two things that
make it endurable here, and what they
boil down to is indifference.
Waves
True little waves, from high above in a window seat
so few of you have enough of yourselves
to fold over onto, forming a dress
you wear out instantly, the most part
of you is continuous skin with its own living
texture curving over the bottom, a bone, though often enough
on land it appears you’re falling
all over yourselves to be tallest, each of you
prim threat of drowning should I contemplate
a swim, the window seat is just a way of taking in
the danger all at once, breathing the ultimatum in
and trying to breathe it back out at decent intervals.
Asylum,
like when I can’t sleep I say to myself
the the the the
the
the
the—
each article drenched to the bone in the
belief it attends something solid,
fond belief, always being
cut in on—the
the
the
the the the the the the
does the trick if I can stick with it
not get swept into narrative, that shock brigade
all tell, if by shock they mean hit
the the the the the the the the
papers say asylum is temporary
now, true, what’s not that’s able to
maintain its potency, you wake up
from a spell in that genre of safety, relative
safety, what saved you
making as if the story were widely shared
until you saw them as-if otherwise and then
what saved you was seeing their look, saying
resemblance too may be at any time revoked so
must be made the most
of,
seeing it then, seizing
the minute dismounting with the foot
trained as a dancer to keep you traveling because
they’d slept and, refreshed, moved the the the the
papers expired, it’s their turn now
to really live
Anonymous
Above these three pairs of dark patent boots
on the highest of three steps, where three
of the six toes jut out past the nosing
making three little cups of shadow
hanging from the top of the riser,
each little cup falling over to the right
at exactly the same angle, three columns
of girls in long coats rise
between two dark pillars on a porch, three bright
numbers running down the right-hand pillar:
1
7
6.
All three wear hats,
each hat forms a porch
around each face, each face
smiles from its porches into the aperture.
Vertical
A stop late, sure, but who gets off the train
a stop early. You did, your mind
did it, as if to clear space
for some new arrangement. Miss it
and the knot leashing you to a place
tightens; disembarking one stop shy
raises the question of whether you plan to proceed.
As the man said, Whither do you follow
your eyes so fast?
Just walk and let the city’s map draw you
elsewhere, somewhere else
with it. Rarely did I enter thus
into collaboration, so cold
it seemed to surprise myself.
I consider it a measure of the distance—
far be it from me—the idea of going away
had gone. Name me a city
as bullying as this one. Low, mean,
drizzling Dublin kept a grip
on her boys but let them go, all but
heaved them out. I’m allowed
to feminize Dublin because I lived there
too, she’s a friend, a friend I avoid.
Mean as in low and dun,
the finest avenues the emptiest
and dingiest, endless wet radials sending
out one long Georgian pile, never thinking
to plant a tree or incorporate a café,
carpeted in the candy wrappers
of English chocolate bars blown among chestnuts
when a sudden gust brings back
the sun for ten minutes
morning and evening.
It too now shoots up panes in air
clenched in the teeth of cranes
rearing at the mouth of the river,
that rinky-dink river. You have to live
somewhere, yes? The information
of the city, any city, will submit
to redaction for, yes, him
financing the air up there,
the shadow real estate. He throws
up home on home on
around the park, which grows
a shade garden. The other way
has always been so wide and long one part of it
will wait three days to hear
it’s been attacked and in effect
is gone. Forming an ensemble
cities sing together in chains
of hand-holders around the globe
during the cold war, releasing their little
fictions with consequences.
Singing you’re free to try them on, the bigger
the body cloc
k the stronger its pull
and cities’ clocks eclipse the planet’s.
That’s how they get you
that building frenzy, each one avid
incorporating another’s thought
into her own in order to become
more herself until the place
is solid masonry.
Cafés on all the streets, yes,
it’s one and the same café, you’re welcome
to step in it twice. Stay too long to afford to move,
you’re free though to jump off the B
before going too far
which is far enough.
You have to steal away, in the night
while sleeping.
Snapshot
When the floods came, washing out tailors
with small square change booths whose fabric
portals never entirely seal you in in dry cleaners
it helped to have done this exercise.
The luxury of each ending’s weakness
for order is the time afforded
between falls to picture what will follow.
No one seems to mind
the season at Fort Tilden stretching
to October, even right-thinking people celebrate
by turning the phone on themselves, the sea behind.
For accuracy in prophecy perhaps
it helps to be unmoved by beaches.
The digital files speak and decompose.
Sibyl
The officers wear plain clothes for weeks
then unannounced for months will dress in uniform.
I assume this is intended to keep me in
suspense as to the nature of
the structure of authority among them,
two of them keeping their distance
and one walking beside me,
a little behind, always talking
into his walkie-talkie
to the two.
It was the one not the two that time
joining me in the sauna
with his walkie-talkie
sweating but still able to function.
I kept my swimsuit on.
I felt the molecules coming and going.
The atmosphere of the sky is also called an envelope.
Why they bother steaming it open
to black out certain clauses
is beyond me. No, they want to keep me in
suspense as to their interference up to and
including the moment I slice it open. Suspense:
I’ve learned to let it hold me like a refuge.
My margins have it in them
to move backward and forward.
Friend
Montaigne was right, without the body’s meddling love
is more thrilling.
Yet from the start in elementary what she did
with it was far
from irrelevant, her jeans, mascara, rings all
articulate.
And she was always so pretty. Claire Birchall of
the yellow hair,
the twins at my birthday party came out and told me
I was unfair
for only playing with her. I said I was sorry.
I didn’t care.
Bev across the street who shielded me from Bridget,
nightmare next door,
not nothing. Then Bev in high school who spared me
the group disease,
four or five girls forever demanding IDs for safe conduct.
I broke up with
her over God (she believed) one lunch hour and after
that was alone.
Then Jenn in freshman year, devoted and dumped me
when I moved in
with Jess in sophomore, who was it. That went on and on
like family.
Then Mary, then Mitzi, then Steffani? How the names
now overlap
as if slackening, hardening, deaccessioning held out this
form of gushing.
Self-flattery. The rush of love’s akin but it’s only the
one I adore.
Insta
And do you suppose if there’d been phones that
Dido would have chilled, monitored his posts
as he sailed into a storm, the photos
parading purple cumulonimbus
and a zone of tender green oxygen
above the horizon, all backlit deluxe
with abundant cash and unspent prestige
of masculinity when he demurred
and beelined back to Sicily for yet
another game, and settling in to hate
read his captions and text them to Anna
she’d not forgive him, obviously, but
regroup, restock her selfies, renovate
her city for posting in panorama
Bowie
David Bowie drove.
Five or six piled in a
van but I’m seated right
behind him, whose driving’s
not bad, it’s good but
fast, faster
and so I clutch his hand.
Idea’s to show us
the city.
It is an elsewhere.
Brushed steel Dolomites miles
in the air
with highways scored on them.
He made me get out
once and swing
those miles up
in a sort of bucket
to touch, swing
over and feel with my
finger the side of a
mountain, quilt
made of steel, each knotted
thread briar of wire.
With my fear
of heights I made with that
live current a circuit
to please him, and made it.
And the whole
long day he
drove he held my hand up
over his shoulder
tight in his
hand, gripping,
no danger
he’d let go,
antidote,
so though he seemed never
to hear me imploring
Please slow down, I could not
love him more.
And when he dropped us
off beside
his ocean, he driving
on in, us
planted there at a loss,
I texted everyone
y slash n
canvassing if given
the day’s events I might
text him, be
expected
to text him
to thank him, my sneakers
sinking in
sand, blinking,
clutching my phone, holding
out for a
y
Salon
We spread our hands out just like friends
their posture is a kind of crouch
you wouldn’t call it kneeling
no, look, they bring their
elaborate efficient arts to bear,
and instruments
of war, a redesign
for commerce here and aimed
at us they find their mark, the end
of every digit or
we’d hold the tip, or would we, it’s
the one place no one has to talk
&
nbsp; and nobody feels guilty for
their place, thank god for all these little knives
Fulcrum
1.
Across the river her voice sends shreds
torn from something gelid, all acute
angles though the surface of each call
is fur and dust. That last body a wraith
of small bones leaning forward whether
to blow her curses out or suck her souls
back in, it’s hard to say. In practice today
the coxswain’s miked. Degraded sound,
a scene with unidentified
afterlives shrieking on background.
I saw the bursts
of drives pulling her between recoveries,
her profile pausing against the far bank
as it raced along, hard to see.
2.
This city with its circulatory
root allows you to turn the time halfway
around to face the other way, and so look
back as though you were the one
you were eating with at that hour
your mouth full of her thoughts
when refugees are weaned in camps
and feeling as never before
with the distinctness of tiny folds
at the edges of documents seen
cascading back into the distance
where one of them must be
the first to vanish
what was wanted of you
Stoic
I like ordinary days. Needing to be somewhere new
at ten a.m. bothers me. I like ordinary days.
Each juncture where I could miss a connection is trouble.
I like ordinary days. Out-of-the-ordinary
days I live through many times. I like ordinary days.
You only live once and if that’s true for you then you win.
I like ordinary days. Doing the usual thing I
can forget it’s happening. I like ordinary days.
Living once is excellent and living less is better.
I like ordinary days. I like never having plans
and not seeing any friends. I like ordinary days.
I like my friends a lot when I’m free to think about them.
I like ordinary days. I like running into friends
in the course of my routine. I like ordinary days.
My friends should accompany me on ordinary days.
