is the one in which she devours an egg sandwich on the overcast train ride to Montauk. Both of us desperate to quit the city, even just for one day, so foolishly we underdressed for the sea. How far a few bucks take us: to the top of a lighthouse, a tote bag full of ceramic souvenirs, a single lobster roll. She poses for photos along the bluffs. I dip my feet into the cold ocean. We talk about our parents, their failures, our own. As she naps on the sand, wrapped in a gauzy scarf, I shiver and watch the clouds move fast across the horizon to reveal sunset’s approach. It is just a sunset. It’s beautiful, and means nothing more than the end of a long day. At dinner, we bicker about the bacon in our pasta. The argument is more about exhaustion than it is about pork. We spend what feels like hours in silence drinking water from a patient bartender. We don’t speak again till we board the last train back to the city when she offers me gummy candy from the depths of her bag. She is alive, and our bodies recline on the train’s seats and thrash with laughter from a joke only we know.

to go to Rome: Live your lives.
We order cocktail shrimp at the hotel bar, 
fries with a parmesan snow. The waiter fills 
our flutes to the brim & we swim 
in the golden liquid & sink into the leather sofa,
the delights so cliché the cliché the delight 
we sing along & avoid eye contact 
with the lounge singer: sha-la-la-la-la 
two brown-eyed girls in love 
dark lipstick on the rim of the glass
& the lounge singer starts Lady in Red 
& we swoon & people around us eat their olives 
from shallow dishes & we order dessert 
to keep the night going, to keep 
the sweetness in our mouths

He tells me he’s a parolee looking for a good
woman but he’s been bad so bad trapped
in a sheet of ice wrapping the meat in
paper shudders I shouldn’t be eating red
meat with my hypertension and high cholesterol
the steaming calf
He says he’s been out six months but still
it’s hard you know how it is the wrong people
their bright ideas attempts to rise his bloody
apron a recipe buckles and
gives me an extra pound

Twice Christ took the bread apart

with his human hands that he used for

such tasks, once with fish and once with wine,

the grain a pattern of tribute, distribute,

as he worked the division of himself into

feeding others with his body, taken but not taken,

there but not there, it was two times

two times two. Ever body got some body

who will feed them even when there seem hardly

enough to go round. When I hungered the word

fed me. Even so, so many others hungered

he needed a hundred more human hands.

That was when I said here take mine.

Morning laps at its bowl of water.
The lake eagerly greets the shore.
A man in his bathrobe does the daily puzzle,
the smell of coffee—six across.

A boy upstairs lingers in bed.
The warmth of the sheets envelops him.
“How many letters?” “Does it fit?”
The promise of pancakes—four across.

He had dreamt forever of a scene like this:
family, food, a true-green home.
(Violence: that’s a cross word puzzle.
The way he’d cry—eleven down.)

Late afternoon. The wind picks up.
A single blank remains.
“I think I’ve got it. Everything fits!”
His heart billows like a sail.

We walked toward the zenith not expecting a new rising sun, but satisfied with the Cheese Whiz, Zebra Cakes, and Zingers at the end of the aisle at Family Dollar. Maybe eat them with Prozac or Zoloft. Later, take in the pine trees rising behind the cinderblock walls of the Dollar Tree. The American alphabet ends like every American factory ends. Zombies wandering around on Zoom. The new zoology. In the Ocean State Job Lot parking lot, I put the words “cheap America lot” into Business Name Generator and got these results: Balaclava America, Zip Cheap, Burb Lot. Nothing much more needs to be said. Maybe there will be more zebras someday. More songs by a reconfigured ZZ Top (you will or will not listen to them on Amazon music). But for now, there are intermezzos, piazzas, and paparazzi for the elites on their mega-yachts, on their spaceship trips into outer space. Meanwhile, the working class orders a pizza delivered by the working class. Zero tolerance for everything and everyone else. Let the Dominoes fall.

Why would I abandon the hunger-suffering 

Vulture, spread-winged in the middle of the road

Eating a rabbit while it snows? Wouldn’t you

Want to touch, watch his comrades close down the sky

And, in a black circle, eat red on the white Earth?

And when the hiss of something slithers in—

Panic un-paused—wouldn’t you watch the circle 

Break into black leaves pulled from the earth and flung

Into the falling sky? Wouldn’t you want to be

A servant of this paradise, not a God

In front of a screen, naked, lonely, asking—

No more a God than the crown of vultures

Frightened by a hiss that was a tire deflating?

Why would you trade Paradise for an argument

                                                            About Paradise?

i)         The bloom—the pretty part we want—is
ii)        often how a threatened plant screams help. 
iii)       Venus flytraps can be sedated.  
iv)       Therefore, they can wake & be made calm.  
v)        Lice hatch ravenous for blood & claw
vi)       linoleum one foot per minute. 
vii)      Mammoth sunflowers reseeded 
viii)     from previous diseased seasons sing 
ix)       the same sickness for generations.  
x)        Pepsis wasps haul tarantulas up 
xi)       mountainsides to provide warm  
xii)      meals for larvae. Imagine children 
xiii)     dragging men across highway lanes
xiv)     to eat them alive, thigh by thigh.

^{after Dorothea Grossman}

During the pandemic, after he was laid off, it was his idea
to forage for edible weeds around Queens when our food grew scarce.

From the stoop, I would watch him crouched on one knee,
his bare hands between telephone poles,

pulling up green stars from the control joints
under our mailbox full of clover mites & commercial flyers.

I almost forgot how sprawl could be so quiet.

When he returned inside, he rinsed off the stalks,
placed a rolled lot on his tongue and then on mine.

He mentioned how “sticky” foods could be a delicacy
in other cultures, as I turned my back and coughed them out.

And later in the evening, he read to me about how
indigenous women prevented pregnancy by drinking

cleaver tea, as he handed me a tall cup of it swirling with honey.

Under Old West guitar and Jazz band trumpet,
where the riverboat steam horn blares,
you order a corn dog.

Beignets and étouffée
are down the way, cowboy,
you don’t have to put up with that.

But the sun dips into everybody’s eyes,
strollers full of screams rock by
and you

start searching, at the popcorn cart and in your life,
for something more
than everything

you’ve been settling
for.

Let me draw a sonnet at this godless hour,
in one sitting, at the sudden taste of you.

#SelfEvidentTruth: reality forms from the verge
of chance—particles not seen but tongued.

Another you wafts in as soon as the other
you leaves, my random turnstile of thirst.

But suddenly, alone. Just a memory of taste:
Poached eggs, pancakes, tenderness, knowing

that I have eaten not only what I made but what all
of you served in return, quenched only if swallowed.

Taste has always been a second-rate sense,
unlike our sight, unlike Euler’s Equation that

sees light in chaos. All works of nature evolve
from one moment of coincidence. An absence,

a rebellion, the fifteenth line of a sonnet.

Inside me / The mini-monster is / Eating at the edges / Of my heart again / Don’t feed it my
friend warns me / But my heart is just there / How can I stop the monster’s / Small mouth from
opening / When it wants so much and I / Want to be needed / It’s / The / Anxiety of April / The /
Anxiety of / Being human / I’m walking through the world like / I have / A plastic Tupperware
of Cheez-its / In my Miu Miu bag / Wondering what’s with / Sisters / Thinking / With my
terrible memory I should / Write more things down / Thinking / What work is done so / That
work is done / Hostage / To our breadmaking I try / All the sleep masks to see which / Block out
the most light / Track my money / Until it turns / Into a / Firefly each / Dollar I don’t have /
Lighting my room / Like a film screen nightmare / These days critique / Can’t be subtle even
though / So I have that / Human anxiety / Where I worry / About what people think / It must be
okay / For women like me / To feel all this rage / I don’t care / I don’t care / I don’t care / About
exclusion / Because / We build / Our bodies against / The day-to-day / If what we say / Isn’t
enough / Here’s the data / Is it ever / Enough / I look at / Every / Real / Estate / Listing as if / I
could have / These other / Lives / Who am I / There is / No one / Who can prepare you / For how
your body / Will change