ten.

Tonight we've left the windows
open to the breeze. I leave them be,
even though it makes me nervous,
even though I fall asleep
and wake to the edges
of nightmares. Dreams of the year I lived
across from a dealer, my room
lit by an old picture window
and facing the street, the whistle
of a bullet too loud with it open. Of
climbing the wall into my childhood bedroom,
struggling not to wake my sister,
locked out of the house and caught, suspended.
Of my hair in my eyes and my feet kicking at brick,
breath stuck somewhere between
home and away. Of the monsters that
children fear, and adults ignore.
Here, the trees sound like the lake in a storm,
and I can't sleep for the missing
smells—no pine needle damp, no
granite sharp like a summer afternoon,
no hints of old varnish and the
orange crates my grandfather's father used
to build the windowframes.

nine.

Look, I say, I don't know what to tell you.
I don't know
what you want
to hear.
I want to say I love you,
but there's a bruise on my hip in the
shape of the hibiscus we wrapped round the
deck the summer I didn't get hitched, and
I think that means Tuesday. It's
just what we are, what I am,
and you fall
silent while my voice fills all
the uneven gaps—
that said gasp, for a moment, and I almost
left it there, uncertain
the way I often am—but
in the end I chose sense over significance,
and that is why, I say, we could never
work out.

eight.

I'm thinking a poem about choices.
I haven't written it down yet,
still tasting the possible words
on my tongue, in my throat.
Newly blonde—a lesson to
always read the label, keep the box,
follow the directions.
Accidents can happen, otherwise.
And that itself is a road not chosen,
like the one of the curly-haired boy
on the bus in front of me, in his
Transformers cap—backwards,
as he listens to heavy metal
on an ipod that matches his pink polo shirt.
His sleeves are turned up, and
I'm on my way to buy hair dye.
I don't ask where he's going
right now, but I make up stories, poems
to explain him.

seven.

"You can't ride two bikes at once,"
says a coworker.
She's right, the though of it is
ridiculous, like trying to make a line both
a chord and a tangent.
It can't be both.
The Greeks made that clear.

We shouldn't try,
should stop trying to turn ourselves into
something we aren't, should stop
pushing children into
molds
that will never fit them.

Of course, I can say that
because it's never my child, never my
dreams and hopes
for her that are falling apart.
It's very simple from where I'm
standing. It's a question of
bicycles, not hearts.

six.

There's a boy, a man,
my age or younger,
and he's sitting on the train
with eyelash yarn wound in his hands,
knitting.

A scarf, maybe.
He's new at it, counting stitches silently,
his lips moving through the steps
of his fingers.

I wish him luck.
I could never get the hang of
all that repetition, the patterns.
In my ear whispers

we tether our dreams to the turf
and as a child I would have called
it the radio, a tape, a record, but now
I don't have the words to

describe music.
Perhaps there aren't any left.
What will we call it
in another ten years, twenty?

How will we share the things we
love? In another decade, will he sit
with a child, teaching her
to count? Will she sing
under her breath?

five.

My mother calls, and starts her conversation
with, "Your father doesn't want to play Pontius Pilate,"
and I think, this again? But this is what we do.

We argue, in that way that means we agree. Static. A breath.
In the background I can hear him laughing. We talk only
when my mother calls and starts the conversation.

And it hurts, this open space. I still know the words
but no longer believe them, can only recite the childhood
verses, think, this again. This is what I do

to keep the peace, to paste myself into a family
who raised me and let me go. I answer, because
my mother calls. She starts a conversation, and

the careful language of biblical interpretation holds me
still, a string from her heart to mine, a mirror of our losses.
Even as I think not again, this is what I do:

I keep talking. She doesn't interrupt, I break into tears
and still the words come, our onslaught of uncertainties.
My mother calls, she starts the conversation,
and I think, finally. Again. Let this be what we do.

four.

I've been reading TS Eliot on the bus.
He makes me laugh, loves poems but detests
poets (hints that Johnson was a wanker,
claims Milton spoke his own dying language,

reserves for Joyce strange special kinds of cruelty
wrapped in beribboned backhand compliments)
and I imagine going down to the pub with him.

Did he go to pubs? Did he sit around with a pint
and listen to people call him names he
didn't know? Did he swallow down the thoughts

he didn't want and drink faster? I bet no one
ever told him to smile pretty as he walked down
a sidewalk or sat on a bus. I bet he could wear

what he liked (kitten heels and short skirts, maybe
corsets—who knows, even fishnets, garters, fabrics
that shout strangers can touch) and go out

alone, even late at night. I bet he never poked
himself in the eye with his mascara wand.
I bet, when he argued that poetry should be in
phrases that are genuine, I'm not what he meant.