Where will I cry?

When I do not live in the city any longer, where will I cry?

When my body is set back on its well-known streets, will my rough voice hush?

Will I drive in a car fast, beating time to the quick-changing feelings?

Will I walk down the sidewalk slow, hiding my faces from the neighbors?

Tell me your stories, pour your words over me. Otherwise I forget.

Sing me your songs, all you glorious air and wind poets. I need songs.

How many people are pacing, pacing through America's small towns?

How many nighttimes are crashing their sunsets, blood made out of hot songs?

I chant, you chant. A car passes every hour. There is no place to hide.

I count, you count. The guitars parade their greedy strings from east to west.

We are remade, strung on our inventions, counting, facing down midnight.

We are remade new by the very hours that are breaking us apart.

There is no other side of the street. There is no hiding in echoes.

When I do not live in the city any longer, where will I cry?

I remember

I ate picnics of peanuts and raisins, boiled eggs and cucumber sticks

Mommy in her sleeveless dress, the thick army blanket, the mango tree

I ate tuna fish from cans, spread on the bread that Tata Ignace baked

In the kitchen, with its glass door pane renewed but my wrist marked for life

I ate chocolate triangled and speckled white, the white marbling swirls

Cold and melted and cold again. I ate it hiding under the stairs

I ate pineapple upside down cake piece by piece straight from the freezer

The freezer bloody with beef cuts. I'd seen half the cow. Watched it cut up.

I ate grapes on Long Island in the Bible translator's hot back yard

My first grapes. That yard, that day, they still come fresh to me when I taste that.

I ate rice and peas and creamed tuna on my birthday year after year.

Someday I will eat it again. I can't wait. But my mother is dead.

I ate sugar cubes from the cupboard, its legs in tin cans of water

So the ants couldn't climb. Sugar cube after sugar cube. From the box.

I ate the grapefruit with the grapefruit spoon, drank the juice from a squeezed arc

Rows of grapefruit in the dark pantry. I drew faces while they rotted.

I ate peanut butter cookies, with their bumpy brown topography

Endless craggy mountain ranges, flattened for me by my mother's fork.

I ate the late-night subs, the smoky pizzas, the spaghetti you cooked

Exotic raw egg yolk, your mother's handwritten words not yet foodstained.

I ate the only vegetarian thing on the menu's back page

In so many restaurants. Ordering five drinks to make up for it.

I ate rice cakes and cottage cheese when Weight Watchers prohibited grapes

I dove into enormous green salads and forty-eight-ounce smoothies.

I ate oatmeal for breakfast, enlivened with salt, bananas, berries

I ate it alone, in the dark of the morning, my ritual feast.

A walk

I went for a walk dressed only in loveboots and tabloid memories.

I went for a walk across this country of mine, stopping where I bloomed.

I went for a walk through airport colors, the worn path of old shaking

Retraced the steps of the phone calls: two doctors, long holds: your mother.

I went for a walk across the azaleas, proud loud visitors

I walked. I walked through the stories that growl and purr. I danced it with you.

I am walking straight through right and wrong, clear across the grief and delight

I walked through the night, pirouetting on the clear driving emptiness

I went for a walk when I had no legs. I had no clothes. No reason.

I went for a walk across this country of mine. I have no country.