44

no dice

43

For one week
It was hard to sleep
Dreams of situations
Full of anxiety

I missed you
The way your stomach
Collapses in deep exhales
And then you're asleep

The looming fear
I knew it was coming
(I hate to say)
I felt some relief

It happened too quickly
It's over too soon
-KM

I lost my time and now it
is in the waves and wind by
the edge of the ocean in the
northeast. I will think of it often.

Within a few weeks in a new
apartment with a new job,
I will keep your arms around me
and grow rosemary and basil.

In other moments I think
about walking in the woods
and hearing the sigh of my
own breathe against a backdrop

of crinkling leaves, rushing water
and deer on skinny legs.
-Hannah

42

How strange it must feel
To be forty-eight
The weight of days mark the body
Signs of time spent

Reunions must be unsettling
And mirrors alarming
They're reminders of this body
Holding thoughts, repeating daily motions

Seeing old friends
What do they think?
How have we changed?
Are memories the only link?

So many ways to spend a life
Sometimes its easy to forget to look up
-Kim

Children who are called scholars
sit in desks and listen to the teacher
who explains her whole name is
her identity and it is important.

On the way to the building
the street smells like many-day
old fish and their are iron shields
over the shops.

Inside the building, the walls
are green and yellow. From
my small seat the
evaluated train rattles.

Maybe I will come back
here.
-Hannah

41

The roadsides
are full of chicory with little
purple flowers all in a line.
In 1992, it was only wild asters

and black-eyed susans calling
to daisy cousins on
the New Jersey Turnpike.
My parents drove with the windows

rolled down in their 1978 Dodge
and sections of sentences whisked
past the windows while Sam and I
argued under a pastel bunny blanket.

This year the windows are sealed shut
and I wonder if the chicory is whispering?

-Hannah

 

 At 4:45am on the FDR Drive
The East River reflects so softly
The gentle colors of the sky
In its slow awakening

The half-asleep colors
Weak from rest
Grow stronger
Edges become sharp again

The silhouette of a face
Focused on a point ahead
Candid expression
The highway lines pass so quickly

As the light grows
Shadows dissolve

-KM 

40

Littleleaf linden is on street corners
in Brooklyn with little flowers. In early summer
they bloom, in fall they give a fruit the size
of a peppercorn that falls in between fingers.

On days when littleleaf is holding moister,
I am holding anxiety in the pits of my arms
and in the spaces between my ribs. The young
leafs can be eaten in a vegetable salad.

I feel silly because I am trying to shake it
before in settles so stretch my body and
think about linden wood in honeycomb frames,
in beehives, busy in the summer.

Today it was 97 degrees.
The humidity was high.
-Hannah

Walking up the street
Never noticing the slight incline
Until tired legs
Carried me step by step to my door

The narrow staircase
Never seemed so steep and so tall
Until tired feet
Grew heavy beneath my body's weight

The night's heat seeps into my pillow
It did not seem so thick
Until tired eyes
Closed slowly in the thick tides of air

The smooth textures of arms and legs and sheets
Touched by tired hands
-KM