(after Meg Kearney)
When my ballet teacher noticed how the tips
of my fingers curled back toward my palms
as I stretched my arms fifth-position-high
above my head, she told me I had tight tendons,
then guided my hands out
into the line of the rest of my body.
Tight tendons, but I had a new town
and a new school to match the new millennium,
and no new friends, and when Miss Chris called out
Hands, Elizabeth! in the middle of class
or from the dark of the wings at dress rehearsal,
it was just one more thing I had to work at that
no one else did. Was it any wonder my fingers
wanted to be fists? On the last night of the
twentieth century, my cousins and I wrote
misspelled lists of our favorite things, colors and animals,
books and people. The grownups
ignored us from the kitchen, clinking glasses
of something cloudy and red and we shut our lists
in a shoebox time capsule so that ten years later
I could read that, yes, purple and cats and
bad handwriting, these truths still hold.
At midnight none of us felt any different.
The next morning, my grandma baked bread
with the machine she bought because
the local news promised chaos instead of a kiss when
the ball dropped—go on, the world could end, there would still
be bread. But newscasters make false lovers,
there was no disaster and even though
I was in the back row, my mother gave me
pink carnations on recital night, my sister pulled at my
leotard and said she wanted to be a ballerina too.
Drought
I still think about what would have happened
if it had rained, that night on the porch when
you lazily traced the heat lighting that
rippled across the sky, cigarette dull
against its horizontal brilliance, and
told me it might storm. I closed my eyes
and thought, hope must taste like rain on the air,
then filled my lungs with your dim halo of
sulfur-sweet smoke. But now, I can only
fold myself into a corner, my limbs
tangled, and rewrite that night so damp
circles spatter the front steps, so we are
spun-sugar people and if you still leave
me on the porch, I will not melt alone.
She would feel, sometimes, late at night, a sort of miraculous enlightenment, a sense of Knowing What She Must Do and she would think: I must be brave, I must be bold, I must read more, I must stop caring what anyone thinks, because it is my life and in the end I will be the only one whose opinion is left to matter, and so she would resolve to do those things, be those things, confident and sure and unafraid of all the mistakes she was inevitably going to make because what are mistakes, really, just signs that you have tried and better to be wrong than a coward. And she would imagine what people would say about her when they wrote her biography, what she would say about herself, how she would pinpoint the moment when she lost her fear and began to Live and this would be that moment, skin prickling over her spine, bones shifting the littlest bit and everything snapping into place, letting energy loose, sparking, sparkling.
It would be hard to sit still. It would be as if the future was already happening, as if the hardest part wasn’t still to come.
And then she would go to sleep and by morning the resolutions would have slipped away, running pockmarked and scared in the sharp new daylight and she would be back to uncertainty and insecurity and obscurity and all those -ity things which make life safer but smaller and everything would be out of kilter in tiny, mostly imperceptible ways, like normal, like always.
I refuse to take off my glasses
and become beautiful because
I’m blind enough as it is.
Come with me and we will dance
together on an off-limits rooftop somewhere above this city,
not a calm, civilized, front porch of a roof
but in between the silent hulking generators of an abandoned factory
or around the domed skylights of an apartment building on the edge of downtown
with a spider web fire escape tattooed on its side
that will shudder beneath us as we climb,
unraveling nervous laughter from the hemline of my throat—
Come with me. We will be unseen by the city that glows
unheeded beneath us and the stars will blaze,
unseen, above us but they will take heed,
maybe, of the abstract art in the arcs of our arms,
of the bare flash of your neck when you throw back your head,
of the way we are spinning fast and faster, faster
until our tangled fingers have become a new center of gravity,
and we have pulled ourselves into our own orbit,
until the stars are outside looking in.
We will dance ourselves from shadows
into silhouettes against the screaming orange sunrise
and then we will fling our tired bodies up on a rusty guardrail, elbows locked,
breathing hard because the air is thinner way up here, no really, it is,
and we will peer down as the city rubs the sleep from its eyes, waiting,
waiting for someone to look up.
Come on. We will slink back down into the sunlit morning
and the elevated train will rock us to sleep.
I met him in a January snowstorm, west of Union Station at the end of the Jackson bridge. His name was Vincent. He was homeless. When he held his glove between his teeth to shake my hand, the snow that stuck to my mittens melted on his skin. He told me not to make his choices because someone was going to marry me someday, told me that he’d earned most of a college degree in prison, but had been paroled before he got to finish it. Now I tell people like you not to become people like me, he said. Be careful, he said, it happens so fast. I only had two dollars left over from buying lunch on the train and I cried all the way to the El, dragging my suitcase behind me.
Snow bleached the sky and the man with the saxophone on the corner poured all the air in his lungs into one low note.
What I want is to feel as alive as
the hot summer nights when we sneak outside
to roll down steep dark hills. The way we lie
on our stomachs at the top, slick blades of
grass tracing lacework on our limbs, the way
the first push capsizes the world, then rights it
without warning, then topples it again,
the way the grass pricks at our eyes until
we screw them shut, the way our laughter shrieks
in each reckless half-moment before our
shoulder blades smack the ground—this is what I
want, always, to be turning faster than
the dull world, without caring when I will
stop, without knowing even if I can.
