The shaven rinds of lemon
                we squeeze and stir
                                into our espresso,

In the spring they ripen and swarm the trees,
the waxy little fruits that resemble bald heads.

Setting: crooked Brooklyn—rendered beautiful by a night
of rough, wind-driven snow needled across building faces,
sticking where stucco has worn away over years—fragments
of exposed brick—hard edges of a first, forgotten surface.

We grow old, trying to display such
riches, trying to create scenery
that will hold it in perspective.

I’ve carried this one inside me
like an animal, trying to reabsorb
what wasn’t mine.

The doll will crumble if I leave her at the door. Already,
ash powders her hair. At night, we call our solitudes
equal, one as still as milk in a dish, the other gentle

The sun too is a taken thing. Across an ocean,
a man’s sister does not speak,
leaving this voice to fill for everything lost.

By now, sir, you expect a second installment.
What novel is worth its ink if the hero's ship
never finishes sinking, if the cold tide

If I tell a story of America it will be with the needle
splitting Demuth's needle-pocked skin-how his blood blooms
in insulin as he hunches his shoulder to shield the syringe

Were I there, leaning against a London building's
filthy stonework, gazing by chance into a street
at the moment of this carriage's transit