Behind the Florida man, other
elderly residents of North Bay Retirement Center

repaint sun-baked housing pastel blue
and orange and green and red. They clean

sand from hapless porches. Where have you
been? the villagers ask.

The color orange
picks you up, blows off the dust,
spins you into a molten wind,
stop being a big sucky baby,
one boot in front of the other.

Finding the old hockey skates in his trunk
and leaving brown-leaved trees behind him
he walks down the frozen rocky path
across tamped-down snow—frozen and refrozen for days—
and onto a shoveled square of ice.

Arthritis creeps into my weary collection
while it sits alone in a corner, withdrawing
from society until I nudge it into the circle
of light cast by lit mags and anthologies.

i pledged time to idiocy; wasted hours on bad TV;
await the stutters and stops in conversations as
i dredge up some semblance of reason and push
myself down a path as a way to void the previous poison

when the cat next door was dying
mine would walk over
and sit beside all day.

conformity sits in your body like a curse you learned
in school—wait for the light to change at the crosswalk
yearn for someone to call you a rebel even as you
raise your hand and wait
to be asked

you did not see them

in silver crowns

looking

for the crowns

on their head

You see, the cranes have
visions in their eyes, where chills no longer attack
joint capsules, inflame no more they trill

break my bones into fragments
and mosaic them into mountains

of granite and coal to build
into steel for cities

make me into marble floors
of foreign manors

you don’t need to be
quick

there is plenty more
time

to catch these horrors
in your ribs

When the glass from the car moves past us
And into our father
We will watch in the fading light
Our future rise towards us.

Brothers with broken hands
And a father’s arm wound around our chests.

My feet beg for soil, long to dig toes
into cool dirt, pray to the gravity that pins

me to the surface. I call it grounding.
But those clouds.

After Valentina,
I remember, she visited my dream,
and we sat at a different table. Was it tea?
I think we had tea. And Jim, we sometimes
feast in open air. A carafe of water. Lemons.

Imagine the time
saved! Now you
can have lived
an entire lifetime
to gether with
someone between
breakfast and watering
your bonsai

was loneliness your childhood pet
what elementary school(s) did you attend
how quickly can you pack a bedroom
who was your childhood hero
who held you down

I am made less whole, but what’s separate is dead,
the gnats and flies are thankful, the least still give their least,
the smallest parts of me, the black rot is a feast,
I should be thankful for that, pests shall birth their beasts,

Because you wish you were elsewhere in some sort of home,

and my coffee breaks the bounds of the cup,

I don’t want to think of the basement with its hard underbelly
and exercise equipment shivering in one corner,
the leaky faucet that kept my sleepovers awake,
the fluorescent lights that buzzed and suffocated bugs.

A text from my mother— My
heart bursts with love for you. I can physically
feel it. And my cats stand watch
in the window, linked to the lizard’s every twitch.