by Sarah Kay
with something other than breath.
II.
Most days, waking is the hardest.
But it is also when Poetry arrives—
stands patiently outside the shower,
places its hands on the mirror,
wipes away the steam.
And then there are days when
sleeping is the hardest. The fight
of muscle against world becomes
so constant, that surrendering
to slumber doesn’t promise
nearly enough relief. These are
the times when hands feel nothing
but empty. These are the times
when the ceiling fan is left off.
When this heat becomes the only lover
to hold, the only weight
that feels familiar anymore.
III.
Tonight, I raised my hand to my face
to brush away an untamed curl of hair,
and when it slid past my nose, it smelled
suddenly of you. Not your cologne, or
the soap you use, not shampoo or aftershave.
That skinsmell I find tucked into your
neckplace—that late afternoon nap’s shadow
that rises and falls, rises and falls against
my sheets, leaving traces of you in every
pillowcase. I held very still and closed
my eyes, trying to keep whatever particles
of you I managed to steal, until even my
inhale meant losing you. So then I didn’t
breathe at all, just held my hand against my
cheek, and for a moment, felt that it was you.
JETLAG
My pendulum has swung so far past its point,
it has gotten wrapped around me, throws
me back and forth from my own neck.
My pupils are the bottoms of exclamation points.
I am so tired I can only come up
with words in small bursts of: Water.
Stewardess. Peanuts. Aisle. Magazine.
The turbulence hits and someone has turned
on the washing machine in my skull. The
woman across the aisle has started praying.
I see her mouth: Please let me get home.
Please let me get home safe.
How fast does a body fall
when it is not yet in its own time zone?
Where did I leave summer? Is my passport
still strapped to my ribs? How fast can I swim
with a tin can plane tied to my ankle?
Captain. Speaking. Sorry.
Fasten. Seatbelt. Change. Cabin. Pressure.
Please. Home. Please. Home. Safe.
The ground is a letter I mailed days ago.
Someone must have it by now.
What was the last thing I said on the phone?
Was it, I love you? Was it, I’ll see you soon?
PAWS
Inspired by Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz’s “Hound”
The third time your plane is delayed,
your voice on the phone has melted to a whimper.
I don’t know when we’ll take off,
you say. I’m going back to the desk to ask.
All day, you have been sending me text messages
of puppy love. I can’t wait to kiss you.
I miss the nook of your neck. How strange,
that when you are away, I reach for my
cell phone’s buzz as if it were your hand.
Each shiver in my pocket, a way to find you.
I will see you soon, Love, this morning’s text promised.
And yet now it is night, and you are still lost
in an airport somewhere in Florida, and I am still here,
trying to comfort you through this phone.
I’m okay, you promise. I just wish I was home.
You sigh into the speaker. The static crackles.
In November, a doctor put your dog to sleep.
You didn’t tell me it had happened for the whole day,
because you didn’t want me to worry or be upset.
I didn’t find out until your parents told me, and I reached
for your hand, not knowing what else to do.
I have never had a pet, I do not know this kind of loss.
The quiet of your kitchen does not sound empty to me,
I cannot hear the missing padding of paws on tiles,
the missing pant and rumble of her belly. But the first few times
you came home that week, I did see the way you opened
the front door: the extra moment you waited, the way
your shoulders sank. She was old, you told me.
She didn’t get around like she used to. She didn’t
even jump up when people came in, didn’t run to
bark and greet me at the door. But she was here.
At least I knew she would be here when I got home.
Recently, there have been more airports for the both
of us. Different suitcases and baggage claims, different
time zones and phone calls. My friends roll their eyes
at me when we are out to coffee, and I keep jumping
for my phone. We know, they say. You “have to take
this.” I apologize, excuse myself, check to see that
you are there. Nobody else notices how naked my
hands look. Nobody else thinks the space between
my chin and shoulder seems oddly empty. But I know
what this should feel like. I know what is missing.
At least the buzz of my cell phone fills the quiet.
For now, it will have to do. Until it can be replaced
by the sound of your padding feet and heavy breath,
by the sight of you in the doorway, exhausted and worn,
but finally, finally home.
THE SHIRT
The night I slept over, you lent me your shirt.
When I wore it out of the bathroom, you laughed
and said, Oh, well. Now it’s yours.
I did not understand what you meant
but you insisted I keep it, so the first couple of nights
I wore it like a puddle, splashed through it,
trying to remember how the rain had felt.
When that failed, I found a photograph
of oranges and punched in the glass.
I stretched your shirt across the wood frame, made it a canvas.
I tried to paint swans, but I’m not a very good painter.
They look more like turtles on a bad hair day.
The next night I hung it on the flagpole and tried to signal the gods.
I don’t think the gods read flags. That would make sense.
I made a hammock and tried to rest inside it,
but I may have stretched it out with all my wriggling.
I tossed it in the laundry with the other clothes
and the colors ran, it looks different than it did before.
The next time I saw you, I was embarrassed.
I had tried to make it into something beautiful,
I had done my best to find something new to show you.
You laughed again, your popcorn laugh,
and said, You don’t have to make it into anything.
And I didn’t understand, so you said,
Does it fit?
I said, Yes.
Then just wear it, silly.
BOOM
This is what fireworks underwater feels like. Making out while eating Pop Rocks. Dynamite in a tin can, this is that time you left the popcorn in too long. There is a rodeo going on in your stomach, someone has started a pillow fight, and there are feathers everywhere. Eating cereal with no milk. Bumble bees in the dining room. Lightbulb wars. Someone is playing electric air guitar with the amp turned way up. Tongue on a battery. Socket sex. Lightning confetti. Ice cube Jawbreakers. Tinder lust.
GRACE
To the ceiling, the bedsheets, the mirror, the windows.
To whomever was listening—
For the softly swaying hammock, the salt air,
the clouds that rolled in while I wasn’t watching,
the sounds of someone starting a fire nearby,
the smell of a man’s body, the sound of his sleepy baritone
from within the chest I pressed my head against—
the way his heart beat out of time with his quiet singing,
and his breath came out of time with both—
for the damp grass below us, and the swinging door
of the outdoor shower, for the goosebumps on his skin
from the darkling evening, for his patient arms around me
and the weight of him against me, and for the softly swaying
hammock, somehow large enough to carry all of this.
UNTIL
For Franny
You love each other until the city becomes beautiful.
Until this gutter becomes a monument to that time you
needed menthols, in the pouring rain, in the summertime,
in the middle of the night. Until the street lamps lighting
the way to sundown become constellations guiding you home.
You love each other until you build yourself a city.
The couch is City Hall, the TV set is County Jail, the bed
is an elementary school playground. It is always recess.
You love each other until the city loves you back.
Lining up crosswalks with your doorstep, placing
taxicabs on corners. There is a deli with ice cream
up the block, you have everything you need.
You love the city, when you love each other.
And when you wake up in a city that you don’t recognize,
and the traffic lights blink angry,
it is not because the city has grown cold.
It is not because your hands no longer fit in his.
It is because it is someone else’s turn to lean
out her window into the cold cold morning and say,
Baby, look at all those traffic lights, blinking their way into dawn.
SCISSORS
When we moved in together,
I noticed—
You keep your scissors in the knife drawer.
I keep mine with the string and tape.
We both know how to hide our sharpest parts,
I just don’t always recognize my own weaponry.
SOMETHING WE DON’T TALK ABOUT, PART II
how many times I said yes
how many times I said yes and yes and yes
because it was what you wanted to hear
and what I wanted you to hear
and what I wanted to want
and every time the walls
stayed above my head instead of
falling down upon me upon us
because if it was going to stop
then it would have to be me who said no
the walls were not going to help
and I didn’t say no I didn’t I never did
it was never your fault never yours
never mine only the walls that didn’t tumble
when they should have
when they should have known
they should have been able to tell
when was the right time to fall
THE MOVES
You can tell she is counting exit signs.
You can tell she has left
her shoes by the door, laces already tied.
Leaving is an easy art to learn. But the
advanced steps—the pirouettes and arabesques
are difficult to master.
This is how I disappear in pieces.
This is how I leave while not moving from my seat.
This is how I dance away.
This is how I’m gone before you wake.
POSTCARDS
I had already fallen in love with
far too many postage stamps,
when you appeared on my doorstep,
wearing nothing but a postcard promise.
No. Appear is the wrong word.
Is there a word for sucker-punching
someone in the heart?
Is there a word for when you are sitting
at the bottom of a roller coaster,
and you realize the climb is coming,
that you know what the climb means,
that you can already feel the flip in your
stomach from the fall, before you have
even moved—is there a word for that?
There should be.
You can only fit so many words in a postcard.
Only so many in a phone call.
Only so many into space, before you forget
that words are sometimes used for things
other than filling emptiness.
It is hard to build a body out of words.
I have tried. We have both tried.
Instead of laying your head on my chest,
I tell you about the boy who lives downstairs,
who stays up all night playing his drum set.
The neighbors have complained:
they have busy days tomorrow.
But he keeps on thumping through the night,
convinced, I think, that practice makes perfect.
Instead of holding my hand, you tell me about
the sandwich you made for lunch, the way the
pickles fit so perfectly against the lettuce.
Practice does not make perfect.
Practice makes permanent.
Repeat the same mistakes over and over,
and you don’t get any closer to Carnegie Hall.
Even I know that.
Repeat the same mistakes over and over,
and you don’t get any closer.
You—
never get any closer.
Is there a word for the moment you win
tug-of-war? When the weight gives,
and all that extra rope comes hurtling
towards you, how even though you’ve won,
you still end up with muddy knees and
burns on your hands?
Is there a word for that?
I wish there was.
I would have said it, when we were finally
alone together on your couch, neither one of us
with anything left to say.
Still now, I send letters into space,
hoping that some mailman somewhere
will track you down and recognize you
from the descriptions in my poems;
he will place the stack of them in your hands
and tell you, There is a girl who still writes you.
She doesn’t know how not to.
HIROSHIMA
I.
When they bombed Hiroshima, the explosion formed a mini
supernova, so that every living animal, human, or plant that received
direct contact with the rays from that sun was instantly turned to ash.
What was left of the city soon followed.
The long-lasting damage from nuclear radiation
caused an entire city and its population to turn into powder.
II.
When I was born, my mom says I looked around the hospital room
with a stare that said, This? I’ve done this before.
She says that I have old eyes. When my Grandpa Genji died
I was only five years old, but I took my mom by the hand
and told her, Don’t worry, he’ll come back as a baby.
And yet, for someone who has apparently done this already,
I still haven’t figured anything out yet.
My knees still buckle every time I get onstage.
My self-confidence can be measured out in teaspoons,
mixed into my poetry, and
it still always tastes funny in my mouth.
But in Hiroshima, some people were wiped clean away leaving only
a wristwatch, a diary page, the mudflap from a bicycle.
So no matter that I have inhibitions to fill all my pockets,
I keep trying, hoping that one day I’ll write the poem that I will be
proud to let sit in a museum exhibit as the only proof I existed.
III.
My parents named me Sarah, which is a biblical name.
In the original story, God told Sarah she could do something
impossible and she laughed. Because the first Sarah?
She didn’t know what to do with Impossible.
And me? Well, neither do I. But I see the impossible every day.
Impossible is trying to connect in this world; trying to
hold on to others when things are blowing up around you; knowing
that while you are speaking, they aren’t just waiting
for their turn to talk. They hear you.
They feel exactly what you feel at the same time that you feel it.
It’s what I strive for every time I open my mouth:
That impossible connection.
IV.
There is a piece of wall in Hiroshima that was burnt black by the
radiation. But on the first step, a person blocked the rays from hitting
the stone. The only thing left is a permanent shadow of positive light.
After the A-Bomb, specialists said it would take seventy-five years for
the radiation-damaged soil of Hiroshima to grow anything again.
But that spring, there were new buds popping up from the earth.
When I meet you, in that moment,
I am no longer a part of your future.
I start quickly becoming part of your past.
But in that instant, I get to share a part of your present.
And you get to share a part of mine.
And that is the greatest present of all.
So if you tell me I can do the impossible, I will probably laugh at you.
I don’t know if I can change the world. Yet.
Because I don’t know that much about it.
And I don’t know that much about reincarnation either,
but if you make me laugh hard enough,
sometimes I forget what century I’m in.
This isn’t my first time here. This isn’t my last time here.
These aren’t the last words I’ll share. But just in case,
I’m trying my hardest to get it right this time around.
