Lately

Lately
I read the emergency procedures as I
ride the red line to Dupont
Pluck heroes from the crowd and sit closest to them
Breath anxiety in and out of my lungs while

Talya is coming out of her coma in Mumbai
They say she looks like Natalie Portman’s shaved head now
and that reminds me of Seattle

But I’m back in DC
Worried about voltage
About the inertia running a river like lava under our seats
I pound music in my temples to occupy the space there as

Talya’s temples
brain
crack
skull
fracture
As Eastern antidotes ease her into coma
And I hope she doesn’t sleep long enough
For her parents to
have two special needs kids now.

I don’t know how to breathe in the world anymore
Lately the heaviness of humidity is an elephant in my lungs
And there is injustice and lost souls and
zombies inhabiting grown men’s bodies and
celebrity corpses
fucking
everywhere

And I breathe

Wonder about the people I will keep closest
If they will really only stab me in the front
Or if they come up cold like carcasses from the gravel
I worry about what I can’t see in my periphery

And I think I need to have sex.
Emergency sex
Saturday afternoon with no roommates or formalities sex
And I can’t sleep.

My eyelashes flutter to the beat of a broken commute
And the burial shrouds that crowd the space
where their breath used to be
Lately I’m thinking about the screech of metal
Taking folks to heaven instead of home.
I’m dreaming of Talya’s post week long nap and
Sleep filled eyes waking to hospital lights
bright with confusion
As her shaky hands touch the cracked cactus
where her foot long curls used to be

Lately
We are all trains bound and gagged for glory
On tracks tangled and demented by time
We are all just surviving this
All just bracing for impact
It’s up to no one to tell us how to breathe right again
So we exist on empty lungs and diesel filled skulls
Convinced we are headed to purgatory or worse
Convinced that we can learn to breathe underwater
Convinced our ignition is lit by burning emotion
And not funeral pyres.

And we breathe.

Because lately in our bones
that’s the only thing we all seem to know
for certain how to do.