every sad girl in brooklyn

We gather information from mistakes and we plant them in the garden

Little things like how quickly our mind spins after an accidentally seen instagram post

Or how likely we are to drive to milwaukee after three days that were meant to exist in a vacuum

Slowly we tell ourselves not to understand things others do as if we did them

(The way the podcasts our therapists told us to listen to advised us as we tried not to have an existential crises over the Atlantic Ocean because we did not want to try Xanax for the first time on a plane. Plus we still have trouble thinking we are the kind of person who would take a Xanax, though we revel in the high school coolness of the idea that if we wanted some, we could acquire it.)

I am not trying to be tongue in cheek. I am not trying to be cute

Or to write the poetry of every sad girl in Brooklyn even though sometimes I feel

Like every sad girl in Brooklyn and other times when I am far away

I berate myself for ever rolling my eyes at these sad girls

Want to celebrate their right to exist as a majority

Tell myself I should be thankful for the discomfort of being one among the many

In the same way my aunt told my cousin to finish all the food in his plate

How plentiful abundance looks in all its discomfort 

when one has existed in scarcity

Even now I apologize for any profound statements. I am not trying to be artsy

To be funny I am just trying to say something, anything, that is true.

Varda

Today I learned
That Agnes Varda 
Was born in this neighborhood

And I thought of the movies you make
The way you look at life 
And the way it made me look at you

More than anything in this life
I want someone to tell
Beautiful things to

More than anything in this life
I want someone who collects them
And tells them to me back

Who sees the delicateness
Of a coat hung on the rack
Or a misspelt sign
Or refractions on the tile

Let me kiss you one more time
And I'll be fine
We both know it’s a lie

One mistake like a gateway drug
Into the endlessness of it never being enough

I remember that pain, how it felt like it could swallow me
And yet these days, it comes in waves, and I can feel myself drowning

Renewal

I keep renewing your library books. It is so easy. 

A simple kindness, an intimacy

I extend to you unknowingly. A fear of all this

bureaucracy, small infrastructures of the personal still bridging us even

now, causing disruptions in our own disruption, tying us through

capital, technological, digital space. not all the worlds have caught up 

to the one in which we now live. I have not caught up to the world

I am now living in. In which your syllables make me seasick

everything blurred like the spinning of a washing machine 

is the water everywhere, drowning me or keeping me clean?

Small deaths I knew were coming. The prescience less of a gift

than an inevitability. How can I hold you without you knowing that I am holding you?

Are you holding me too? Why is it so hard to talk to you and feel I am talking to you?

Wading through walls of styrofoam, exhaustion, sunken-in sadness, 

ink-stained hands the telltale sign I cannot ignore. What to do when you do not know what you want?

What to do when you don't know how to make it better? What to do when what you want may not 

make it better? Words feel just like words now. Empty and shapeless. Too polite.

Casual is a tone, a voice adopted for a while. All the while searching for how to say something real.

To you, to anyone, about this. To myself lying in bed. To my friends as they come into being.

Just letters, the awkwardness in between so heavy with all that is not communicated.

All I can do is renew your library books, drop your birthday card in the mail. 

It is true. I am trying.

maybe meaning is less fixed than I believed

"It seems important to you that your work have meaning" the professor had said,

and you nodded vigorously thinking she was crazy that you would want it to be anything else.

You shied away from the power of creating meaning, preferred it as an ultimate truth to be expressed, uncovered.

"I am having such a great time," you told Dr. Clark in Yellowstone, with a notebook covered in scrawls of everything everyone had said. "I'm just trying to figure out what it all means."

She shook her head at you, tut-tutting, you had learnt a lot, but not everything:

You had not yet learnt that you could not learn everything.

maybe I just want to create feelings, colors, questions,

there are hurts that are thrust upon us, ones we create for ourselves, ones given like gifts,

I have never felt more stupid and confused.

my understanding has not yet caught up to my perspective,

not yet pushed it into a new place.

And I begin to think maybe the thing it is perceiving, 

the meaning, is not a fixed object. Like a leaf turned in your hand,

It changes with the light.

I look for the right poem like I am looking for herbs for a medicine

Which one is the cure, which book, which lines within

Which one touches the ailment with words of wisdom

Which one makes the indescribable sing

Which one trades the hopelessness for a question?

I wake up to snow falling steadily,

from a dream of kissing friends and lovers kissing friends.

The snow seems to say: Does it matter? There is no history. 

Or not one that cannot be erased.

It's the steadiness of the falling––rhythmic, endless,

like watching the water drip off the roof into Maria's dog's bowl,

too big an infinity for your mind.

When I read the old words, I can't help but sift through them for the grit,

the flakes of gold, the hidden meaning like a threat among threads untangled.

I cannot reread without waiting to see if more years have brought new clarity.

I'm slow to everything today, Hilary says to you,

I want to be slow. Slow in the snow.

You watch the snow out the window as it falls,

telling you there is no history, but the falling,

the slow accumulation of so many fast movements.

Like ships passing in the night

I lost sight of you a long while ago 

In the ocean of life

I no longer hear your foghorn cry

Forlorn as it goes by

Only the breeze greets me

Saltily

In the dark glow 

Of midnight.

gardener

She was never much of a gardener, but she sings to trees

Learns their names like prayers, in the fall collects the golden leaves

When the rain is cold and the day is night

A fire at her feet

They found a way to grow

A two-thousand year old seed

This is what hope looks like

Believing in life endlessly believing in life

Everyone told her to look for the land of milk and honey

Honking cars, burning money, casual catastrophes

How good or evil is the praying mantis or the honeybee?

She was never much of a gardener, but she sings to trees

They found a way to grow

A two-thousand year old seed

This is what hope looks like

Believing in life endlessly believing in life

Out her window there’s a maple and I know

Down in Virginia by the road her friend’s river birch grows

In the bed mixed with the reeds

The roots whisper from tree to tree

She may not understand, but she is always listening

They found a way to grow

A two-thousand year old seed

This is what hope looks like

Believing in life endlessly believing in life

They found a way to grow

A two-thousand year old seed

This is what hope looks like

Believing in life endlessly believing in life

Believing in life endlessly believing in life

She was never much of a gardener, but she sings to trees