June

There are perfect things in the world, I’ve seen them.

Louise Glück’s “October.” It does me no good, violence has changed me. Late afternoon light. The small thunder of the train overhead, whittling its way through the silver city. Children on their too-big bikes, looking behind to see if their friends are following. Sunrise. Lines of an Emily Dickinson poem recited by my lover, laughingly, which remind me of who I am: Are you Nobody, too?

My window is the length of me. I go to sleep to the decline of day and wake as though the whole world is trying to enter me, become me. My cat asleep on my white chair, which I wheeled down Chicago streets with a new friend, new to me.

June efforts quietly. Lisa Olstein.

I remember true things about myself. I cobble together a syllabus for a writing mentorship I have agreed to, reading poems and stories I had forgotten had moved me. I am moved again.

This is life, now: Morning walks for cornbread biscuits halved by blackberry jam and whipped butter. Drinks under light rain. Smiling into a flash. A glass of orange wine, orange light on a newly dear face. Long, quiet runs. Watching the stars through a stranger’s binoculars.

My apartment is infected with light. The sun reaches every corner.

I still tear myself apart for my decisions, my failures, even the ones that haven’t happened yet. This is normal. This is always. The wounds knot themselves together quicker now.

A day like a day in summer.

The world still turns; poetry is still being written. Everywhere the machine of imagination continues to turn, even as other machines are made to replace it.

How do I tell you, artist mine, that our hearts are the same?

And I take a full lunch when I can get it, for walking or reading. What sticks in the mind makes a sort of boundary of the self, by which I know myself. I keep the lights on like this, when I feel every day of my twenty-three years.

There is no way to make what you feel exceptional; everyone has known what you felt, or will know; take comfort in this. But reading creates a necessary distance from the world which lingers for a little while after, which makes life bearable when otherwise it would be not. And if you can remember it, you can call up that distance like a protective measure, cast yourself into that old magic for a moment.

Robert Hass. And the days churned by,/ navigable sorrow. Agha Shahid Ali. When I go off alone, as if listening for God,/ there’s absolutely nothing I can win of light. John Ashbery. Fine vapors escape whatever is doing the living. Talin Tahajian. Foxes/ wear the voices of the dying. Reginald Shephard. You are like me, you will die too, but not today. Tracy K. Smith. Living, dying, deciding. Li Young-Lee. Was it me in the other/ I loved when I loved another? Ilya Kaminsky. like a dumb pigeon’s beak I am/ pecking/ every which way at astonishment. Louise Glück. You saved me, you should remember me.