We trace the dust lines left behind from the appliances, fumble for the brick foundations between the steel beams, peer at serrated stairlines where the wall paints stopped. Reincarnated. Tenement apartments become dance spaces without barres or mirrors, in the dank basement of a bank on Market Street, in anonymous green-carpeted rooms on Mott Street.

The boy found hanging on the golf course.
The boy with the bruises, who’d arrive
to school coatless in the middle of winter.
The man with the red face and the thick stutter
who cleaned up our vomit in grade school.
The veteran who spoke to the seventh grade,
confessed how scared he’d been and wept.
The cousin who disappeared completely
after she refused to eat anything but olives.
The mother who was a drunk. The father
who told us all he was an undercover cop
and that’s why he had the gun. The boy
who got shot. The boy who got cancer
in both legs, his angry dad, his frail sisters.
Why we never got responses to our get well
soon cards, the mute teachers continuing
their lessons plans. What happened
to that hungry black dog who’d bolt
through the school yard, the one
that refused to stay leashed.

Turns out things aren’t going that well.
Turns out you wake up and you’re thirty,
and the clothes you are wearing aren’t ironic
anymore. They are the clothes you wear.

One day you wake up, and look in your closet
and realize it is every terrible thing your mother
ever said to you, all cut from 100% poly-blend.

These are the days your shoes dissolve in the rain,
the days your boss asks if that’s a hole in your pants,
and you don’t even have to look down to confirm.

These are the days you pin a poem to the page
just to see it stare back at you, gasping for air.

Surely the body is made
                        of stranger 
                                    things than politics
                                                           can steal:
          the tangled
                                    residue of stars,
                                                the plastic
                                                bag and orange
          peels I kick past
                                    the bridge,
flaming nerves splayed
                        across ancient and forgotten
avenues, the stomach-heavy goodbye
                                    to others that always
          feels a limit
                                                on anyone’s remaining days
I see now
                        I really did
          believe that the stories
                                                           of languages breaking
                                    open the embedded
                                                           money source
                                                                      were the victory
                                                of changing grandeur
over the paltry measured
                                                ties misnamed time—
                                                                      I could never believe
          that people meant the counting,
the stacking, the definitions
                                    the dividing,
                                                           that those could be more
          than misunderstanding
                                                                      even when 
                                                                      burned in iron;
                        The world is simply not 
anything any of us
                                    say of it
our names are strange delusions
          pulling us back
                                    from a brink we are always
                        falling through—
                                                           it has no shape
                                                           no words
                                                           it is 
                                                           not a brink
                                                           we are not
                                                           anyone there is
                                                           no falling