It Doesn’t Take Long to Memorize the Choreography
I.
Blackout: Watch for unexpected love.
Blackout: No, your unexpected chaos.
II.
Don’t you like it when your watch sinks lower on your arm? Don’t you like adding another notch to your belt? Don’t you like this honey on toast? Don’t you like the East River run? See the boy playing the trumpet to no one in particular. Such a sad song drenched in tar. Don’t you want to be like the woman sitting on the bench next to you? Saying, My husband saved me. He really saved me from myself.
III.
Sometimes you hear grief before you see it. A breaking in the voice. The impossible act of forming words. I don’t want to be alone, so I surround myself with strangers. That’s what it means to live in a city: so close to life—all the time, all around us—yet so distant behind the windows of a restaurant or an apartment. There’s nowhere else you can be so alone that it aches. Language fails and we live inside our own fragments.
IV.
A taxi splashes a girl wearing white.
A phone rings, no one picks it up.
You don’t lift your eyes up from the ground until the light flickers like a bug trap in summer. The sweet, quick buzz of life.
