It’s how I feel when I get off the phone in the second or two after you or I hang up, and the music starts up again in my earbuds just loud enough to fill my world but not enough to drown out, playing me off down an avenue by the water, the sun a spotlight on starboard shoulder, mine specifically, freckled in seasonal, discursive patterns: a conversation, a morse code, a secret language between this flesh and that star.
It's the candy wrappers stuffed into emptied plastic soda bottles before they’re thrown out together anyway, and how I’m walking home intuitively and without a map, noting which strangers stare politely or even obviously at these bare shoulders or midriff, not knowing in the brief moment of our passing if this skin burns before it can tan.
It’s the fact that this jazz suits the moment perfectly, as though my life were a film, and how sure I feel about this and how I’ve never been more certain of anything until a bossa nova comes on to change my mind so easily and so quickly that I feel spineless and free, twenty-six now, strolling the sidewalk and writing this poem with just two fingers, thumbs left and right, only lifting my head to look both ways at a one-way junction, still taking mother’s advice to heart.
It’s the baby who waved at me without smiling, her girlish curls a mirrored omen I try not to read into, and how the carrot juice I picked up on a whim shouldn’t add to the image I’m trying to curate, since I was just thirsty, I promise, and anyway my neon pink shoes feed more into the myth of my mystery and the misguided singularity felt wearing them, when in all likelihood there’s someone else within three blocks who’s got these shoes too, and perhaps even shares our curl pattern.
It's the name of this poem as I’m walking through the neighborhood of orthodox Jews, a title that you know, of course, but which only came to me now passing two men in brimmed hats who won’t see past this haircut and will never know my name or the letters we share.
It's the “Lost Cat” flyer freshly pasted and desperate, and how I almost don’t even notice it or care, so little are the chances of being found, so little is it helpful to anyone but this cat’s human who, having designed and printed and pasted this flyer, can sleep knowing that at least she did everything she could, and don’t we all for who and what we love?
It's how vapid I must look texting and walking like this, and my smiling lips imagining your dismissal, how I’m symbolic of something typical, or dumb, or unaware, barely watching my step and typing frantically into my appendage the black box as fast as these fingers allow, without line breaks or spell checks or punctuation, lest I forget this, how it feels to be whole.