say something nice now.

This body is beautiful simply because it exists. After the mad, the starving, the sliced open-and-out-of memories, the question marks and mangled screams, this body still wakes.

Today, when you are feeling like the wind is too pushy, bend your way toward a moment of kindness.

The moon is polyamorous and will never run out of energy to love someone new. Give it your phone number. Invite it in. Its glow will remind you how illuminated you are.

Bridges are not just meant for jumping. They guide you toward the other side. From Brooklyn to Manhattan. From one borderland to another. Even with your fear of heights, look down, but remain on your level. It is a curious and brave thing to remain sturdy and steady.

Now, you can love. Now, you can love because you are gathering up letters beside your bed that remind you how necessary you are. These letters exist on paper and etched in your skin. Your silences have grown muscular. With tongue and vocal chord. Your silences no longer want to remain still. Now, you can speak up and love without restrictions.

Give up your hiding spaces. You deserve to be seen. In whatever form you take up and in as many ways as possible.

This body is beautiful because it exists. Because after all this time, it still asks questions and takes questions and has even has a collection of answers now.

 

notice what you notice on the Bowery (NYC)

Chase men’s denim throughout [this] connection

 

grey and brown pigeon collects a love affair in the middle of the street

jumps toward traffic light when the green arrives

 

woman of red lips

swollen in window

I wait for her to notice me

she is mannequin

 

siren. horn. rubber against winter wet or confused spring

 

“what will you leave behind”

recover extension of organs

 

these are just lines

no one waits in them anymore

they are too busy

drawing them

 

a slice of orange

mural dripped into rocks borrowed for this moment

 

“there’s no constitution”

everything must go

 

woman in yellow neon runners

sits on groceries

rolling her addiction

 

a sink, an egg poacher, something called

a zen iced-tea maker

 

EXCLAIM

poet runs across street

this is the last time I saw her

 

ivy cannot be trusted

 

women wear pocketbooks as though they are men

slung over

 

branches like the death of Autumn in Liz’s garden

a yellow wrapper with twenty bites left of chocolate chip or raisin bran muffin

a pumpkin sacrificed for its color

these trees, like starved dancers bending backwards

these are the last of the leaves

 

notice the backs of her thighs

like lined paper

I have my words ready

 

do you think in haiku as well?

 

“I want this for breakfast”

I put my reflection of my body into her 

blue-sequined dress

even as a shadow

I am drag

 

when I have no one [left] to embrace

I notice everyone else is

 

this wind slants

yellow plastic caution drowned in Sunday puddle

 

“once you figure out what subway to take”

the

“should we do the softball pose? what kind of pose should we do?”

the poetics of vandals

They are removing this. Someone somewhere decided that hands are convicts in need of a punishing. All that paint that got fired from cocked fingertips will be erased. Sometimes buildings are protected like bodies, but someone always gets in. Call it a rummage. Call it a bomb threat. Call it infiltration of societal disintegration. At some point, skin gets written on like tagged windows or carved benches. On arms, pronounce the nicknames of suspicious life. On thighs, there are syllables that should have been forgotten but in all these scribbles, stories allow room for the movement. So move.

 

 

when the words forget to come, scrape body against some graffiti

Sometimes, NYC subways travel above ground and when this happens, the darkness of tunnels is replaced by stretched out buildings, rooftops and the carefully sprayed graffiti tags dying buildings from brick to illumination.

As I travel from Brooklyn to Manhattan to Long Island City, my hazel takes in one of my favorite sites: the protected art of graffiti masters called 5 Pointz. Colors climbing into their brightest hues. The aliases of brilliant spray painters. Rappers immortalized. Women wearing…their nude or flaunted curvature. Poetry. Lyrics. This is art in its finest moments because it is alive on these buildings.

Graffiti is controversial, but it is where Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring began. Find them now at MOMA or fancy gallery in Chelsea.

It spans continents and socio-economic classes, and graffiti’s history is just as exquisite as its imagery: born in prehistoric cave paintings. Some languages even grew inside the womb of graffiti. Through this art, we have knowledge of other cultures and traditions. It’s how we have documented war and memorials.

So, when I am trapped inside cylindrical transporter called subway train and I am searching for words to suck on because I just finished reading another book and I have no snacks left in my backpack, I look up for a moment and breathe in the fumes of this art.

This is when the words exhale.

heat gathers steam off body

Asleep, I dream of babies, bodies that birth books, equations written into sky that predict deaths and a chimney burning off layers of inhabitants’ skin.

When the summer arrives, the last layer of made-in-China-synthetic clothing is removed and sheets gather an abundance of sweat. My windows are wide open like my lungs or my thighs and I struggle to detect any sort of breeze coming in.

How does rise in temperature still remain a surprise? I have lived in this body for over three-decades and yet I feel unprepared for this.

Hair gather above my head like a screamed poem and my neck is free. Beneath my breasts, enough perspiration can be found to lubricate a cookie sheet. I am aware of my weight, my depth, the space above my upper lip that houses beads of heated moisture.

In one week, I temporarily move away from this city where buildings scrape sky and graffiti interrupts buildings toward a more mountainous one. The heat is different there. Not as sticky, but perhaps a bit brighter.

Seasons are perfect transitions as life moves forward. In search of signs reflected off leaves on tree outside my window, I think of summer as the foreword to my next chapter. Limbs are slightly more exposed now.

Days are far more open.
Wallet echoes.
Passport flirts with my indecision to stay here.

Heat gathers steam off my body
leaves an imprint
of fragmented,
impulsively patched together
and full of question-marked
map.

oh bridge, oh breadcrumbs, oh night of graffiti’d silence!

I am looking down a lot.
I am looking down for the crumbs to lead me home. Lead me into the kind of love that shocks my poems and lowest rib. Lead me toward employment. Lead me closer to where the moon naps during the day.

There was a walk.
There was a walk across Williamsburg bridge where graffiti lit our steps and to look up was to read the stories of every climber, every dreamer, every escape artist and mother and poet and traveler.

I thought about jumping.
Does everyone think about jumping and wolves and the rising cost of stars in the sky when height is involved? When there are cables and wires and metal everywhere and trains slide by right below and how wonderful to jump on top of one and see how far it gets me/us….

how much longer will we be able to afford these nights?

[now]
there are lists written on my forearm and they contain the code to my cerebellum.
these words include the password to that memory from five years ago when I traveled up that roller coaster called parking garage and gave away my gave away my

[later]
a movement.
don’t call it a dance.
call it a bridge between others
call it a poem through limb’s language(s)
call it making love on stage
call it the intricacy of tangles and hitchhiked bodies
call it:
an end.