For how many years have I kept up the lie, the story
of the middle-aged man in the cap and the gray
or possibly bluish sweatshirt
gaining on me in the night, wrenching

Even relating it, Sofia shivered with the weirdness of it.
He’d read all my stuff online, I mean all of it. And he was like, glistening with the effort
of being nice to everyone, but especially me. How he knew I’d be there I don’t know.
What I hate is that I bought it. I thought he was lonely, sure, but changed, mature. It was only
after, walking home, that Jen told me. And I yelled at her for letting me interact with that,
which I regret, but she fucked up. I don’t care if he’s sober: hate is worse. Hate is poison.
I’d been murmuring sympathetic words, my face mirroring her revulsion; now I filled my eyes
with the care I felt for her, and feel; however, what I could find to say ended before the love did,
so a small silence came, Sam squeezed her hand, our expressions softened to the resting smile,

Some waves came up overnight, though in Norderney, there was no weather.
At the commercial wharf, a thin stream of white exhaust rose vertically from the ferry.
The first service would depart soon. The puddles lay dark in the stone streets

April 2020

When I came to—crocuses were pushing up
purple in my garden, return of the cooing dove—

and when I got out at Penn Station there were no faces
along the tracks—

wind blew through 32nd Street with a faint whiff of onions
and hair spray

Plugging in the portable heater and pulling it toward my legs I remembered
The braziers under the round table at the finca you brought us to
In the Spanish hills. It was January, a searingly cold afternoon, and in a cave-like room

A musician tumbles bicycle handlebars
  on a sidewalk and makes jangling music;
a gardener prunes branches, then shakes
  the Japanese maple to drop a few

Take this pic—take this
newly minted plaque.

For plaque, read empire. Say—puff puff
pass. Say—Baba, please. Zip up. You and your dirty

One hundred and eighty-two pages spreads her story like disease.
They send me one false daughter—Dracula—
and then carefully erase the scene.

        She’s been erected out of thin air—with the thin air of money.
In Konya—I scream—in Ulus—I embrace her—
while these papers spread her story like disease.

What remains of you beloved

                                        to haunt Self
like the tangled script of an ancient king
                speaking
across time

Dr. Redacted will tell me not to tell you
this, like this,
in a poem: how it’s all right, love, that we don’t love
living.