Three Poems

THIS IS A DAY

This is a day for concealing an important package containing a long-lost object to be returned to someone who doesn’t even know it exists
This is a day for feeling around for your secret self the quiet parts where the hell are they
This is a day for vowing to read extensively about conceptions of the self and wishing this had been a part of the 8th grade curriculum wtf
This is a day for listening to Santana, lifting weights, and inviting select sperm-having exes to an insemination jamboree
Maybe some almosts could come too
Whose initials might be B.L.
For feeling the adrenaline solving many personal problems and wishing that the gym you were in was solving some collective problems too
A day for a lack of lyricism in the gymnasium
A day for the wistful realization that you’d be rooting for some sperm more than others
A day for being glad you met Sienna who had the idea in the first place that genius
And for thinking how the plan would make sense of why at eight years old you had such a clear image of living on a mattress on a California cliff above a highway that was filled with the headlights of cars containing men waiting to have sex with you the woman on the California cliff
This is a day for bitterly acknowledging that you too are a coward and a prude
This is a day for a smoothie
This is a day for tomorrow
and yesterday to cling to one another in the middle of a dance floor called forgiveness
A day for dropping the bar in the midst of benching, looking around for help and getting it when you were just thinking how no one would hear you calling help help bc airpods
Though the person who helped was sort of weird about it
Perhaps on account of your style of beckoning
This is a day to remember walking the bridge from greenpoint to queens and the car threw 5 lb weights out the window and hit you and Zibs in the stomachs and your reaction was to run and scream towards them as they drove away into the chomping sunset

DARK BLUE HAUNTED HOLLYWOOD

She stood in the kitchen cleaning and dreaming of her honeymoon in haunted Hollywood
And how all the married people would get to be the murder victim
Everyone husbands wives spouses partners everyone
And how it really is funny to pretend that you’re dying when you’re not
And the next time she was feeling suicidal maybe she’d start play dying dramatically
And could that be a business
A business where you have thought up funny ways to die with a consultant
Anvil on the head, choking on sprinkles, being poisoned by someone funny like Steely Dan, stabbed by a squirrel, shot by a runaway drone that’s developed its own consciousness and is not interested in serving imperialism and keeping the market algorithms throbbing but would rather kill one particular person for some particular predilection such as a what the drone now regards as an insufficiently jaunty walk
A scene where you can gasp and yell I’m dying and clutch and then you’re not dead and there are people clapping
With the right investors the effects could be quite convincing
But it’s not about the effects
It’s about the people clapping the class clapping the school clapping the city clapping the morticians because you you you’re not dead
It wouldn’t work for a lot of people but probably more than you think
Probably americans maybe it would work for, especially the youth maybe, especially if you started doing the play dying at a young age and it was like a routine that everyone knew and there was a community stage for it or a channel but no it’s better in person
And when you don’t die a lot of clapping
The thing is a lot of people really would sign up to volunteer to clap for someone who hasn’t really died but is in fact alive
Old people lonely people well meaning people exasperated people jaded people probably also killers
Probably frats and sororities for community service
She stood in the kitchen cleaning and dreaming of her honeymoon in haunted Hollywood

IT'S INTERNATIONAL THIRTY YEARS INTO THE FUTURE DAY

and I’m off to watch the children’s presentation at the school but
I can’t find my keys. They’re doing it on ice cream, they told me.

Weird, I thought, the other small students and the university students
and the incarcerated students have prepared presentations on beaches,

on fauna, on the sheath of air encasing the planet. In thirty years
ice cream. In the first place I find their joke, a cartoon drawing of

a key hanging on the wall hook. A hologram on the table. By the third
trick, a piece of silver that glints like a bead, carved in the shape of a

skeleton key, I sob “April Fool’s Day is canceled! It’s International Thirty
Years into the Future Day, where we, through youth-led scholarship,

confront, as a global community, what is happening!” The children know
me so well. In the next key places, pockets, they’ve scrawled on notebook

shards Not for you it isn’t. See ya round, clown. It’s not just a question
of security. The doors have been locked from the outside. This the kind

of crying that keeps one young. The kind of puzzle that children lay for
mothers to unripen their minds. They’ve never been grounded. Before,

I remarked that they rooted themselves in their beds with their portals—
but they haven’t known the architecture of bed sheets out of windows!

On bare mattresses, red noses. Black diamonds on the linen shelves.
Ice cream is the only thing they’ll eat, and there are endless flavors. The

astronaut kind. On sticks. Let’s save these paper cartons, I once offered.
We can reuse them to start seeds. “I do want to know the cold treats of thirty

years forward!” I don’t waste this sherbert, this Klondike. I spoon swallow lick.
Ingenious children may have hidden codes at the bottom of this pint, or this.