Anti-Heroin Chic: two poems
i went to chicago like everyone does, unprepared
but i was loving, and my coat was atrocious. and now? it likely floats in the ocean, undying, unlike everything i hold dear. i stayed for good reasons. it wasn’t the cigarettes, being 28 at 2am, or even the blue line, not even the hot dogs. it wasn’t the endless rows of parking meters stacked parasitically as police along lonesome asphalt lots cracked with indian grass in this big-shouldered, meat-grinding machine of bad sanctuary, where every type of municipal violence has been imagined by near-dead unholy bastards, perfected for two million dollars a day. it wasn’t the cruelty. it was the way a place lets you see it: rotten with potential, ripened to the core with every sort of survival, story, laughing even, lightly liquored up and layered, one year at a time, a little more sensibly. not much. we can leave what we love. bring a good coat.
we should go to school for breathing
it took me leaving. everything. saying yes to stillness.
what once was possum left four months to sink
into the sidewalk, reclaimed long since by scavenger,
pearlwort, bittercress, what grows where dying goes.
dandelions, whose name i say sleeping. it took taking
the only man i'll marry by the hand and saying
what i wanted for once. to fuck under full moonlight.
it took my nakedness. forgiving it. body on sunday,
covered in mud. body on sunday breaking, baking bread,
myself, late afternoon. god-sun in september.
i wasn't born patient—i made me this way. believing
the black birds show me. it took believing. when i say
i mean faith. i mean—could you look at me now and not
say miraculous? i call you just the same. my dove.
i am telling you. take what you love close to you.
lay a blanket on the grass.
