Love,
what a life it has been without you.

You wouldn’t believe me if
I told you.

Love,
I hold your hand while I wait
in the checkout line. You don’t
mind if I ponder Kardashian
reign or buy a pack of
strawberry-cheesecake gum,
you never have.

I know your hand already,
the way I know the arcs
of his dark lashes, or
the smell of the shorn
Iowa gold and green
through the open window.

Love,
you would like him. Love him,
likely, because—

after all—

we’re talking about you.

My little man, he lights his own way.
He is his own keeper. Still, I keep
as much as he will let me. I press
his words carefully between my
mind’s pages and my lips against
his bristled hair. Mom, stop.

Love,
I miss you with me. I miss you
with him, because I knew you,
once or twice, somewhere.

I spied you on the Ferris Wheel,
but it was just the sun in my eyes,
or something like that, as the
story goes.

Love.

He is unhappy today and I am weary.
This is our sometimes place, he and I—
table for two, a fable of two.

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
Neither does he. So we decide on both,
then go to bed early.

Meanwhile, my love,
you rest your heavy hands and
aching head on the steering wheel
where you can’t be seen,
a thousand yards or a thousand
miles away. It’s been a long day
there too. I would come for you
if I could, you know I would.

What remains of me?
How absurd it would be,
to ask this aloud.
Yet you and I both ask this
of ourselves, daily,
half-relieved there is no one
there to offer an answer.

Love, I know what remains
of you. Lift your head and
listen. Hear me, wherever
you are, wherever you go.

Your kindness remains.
How do I know? Because we are
talking about you.

Tomorrow and each day until I
tire of this game called hope,
I will say nothing, nothing at all.
But I will feel your touch
between my shoulder blades in
the checkout line—

gently nudging me awake,
as I slip back into this
clumsy thing called life,
into the warmth of my own skin,
into what remains.

—for beautiful Heidi

Because she asked for a poem about the stories of our lives, or being on the road.

HEMINGWAY THOUGHTS

The one my oldest youngest
self thought she would marry
texts me from a tiki bar
perched on the neon edge of
one of the foolish states.

His eight-point Arial words
bob on the surface of my
fifteen-dollar pinot noir.

I too am passing time
in one of the foolish states,
in an airport that thinks
too highly of itself.

I sit in a second-story
pizzeria that bills itself
as gourmet and wonder at
the technology that links
my past to my present.

Tin cans. Invisible string.
Smooth glass, sensitive as skin,
clear as the pond of Narcissus.

I dare touch. And touch again.
Words appear, then float up
and away. See? She who was
jockeys for position with she
who is. She is distilled here—

behind a screen—

but she is never still.

He is driving to Key West this
afternoon, he says, to have some
Hemingway thoughts. He’s gotten
too much sun, he knows it.

Our fingers trace bird tracks
on these things called cell phones.
In the summer of 1990, our toes
left prints in the damp midnight
sand on the outstretched finger
of one of the serious states.

When we looked back, the prints
we had left were glowing—

phosphorous, we learned—

(there was so much to learn, then)

their way of asking if we were
certain we wanted to keep going,
if it was worth it to press on,
with so much beauty trailing us.

We kept going.

Now: driving, boarding.

He is gone and I am going,
again.

I swallow the last of the red
that had hoped to be more,
had hoped to be the star of
this awkward dinner theatre.

The airport logo smiles from
every surface. Welcome to DFW.

I have never been here.
Does this even count as here?

Blondes. Hats. Tans. The smell
of oil, of crisp hundred-dollar
bills, of cowhide. Duty-free,
the walls taunt. No tax here,
no obligation.

You can have what you want in Texas,
no strings attached. For this is DFW,
the land of the grand,
the land of the broad-toothed,
the land of the careless
and glad.

DFW, I think.
Duty-free wins.
DFW. International.
Don’t forget wonder.
Just a few Hemingway thoughts,
for the road, for the way.

—for Cheryl U.

I spend this thing called life
scanning my horizon for signs
of yes or no.

I love the maybe of the seabirds
as they pick their way across their ruined
stage, littered with broken shells and the
fat, sloppy potholes of human feet.

Audience participation is encouraged.
They size me up. You? Me? Maybe?

I watch, but I do nothing. If they could shrug or
sigh or spit at my feet, I imagine they would.

They are not attached to their maybes.

Smart birds.

They lift off, flaming into every white-hot yes
you have ever known, in this lifetime and your last.
Believe me.

The sand is strewn with the cast-off hulls of
the maybes of the gulls.

I wonder why no one bothers to take them home.
Why not line the kitchen sill with a string
of found maybes from the beach?
They’re marvelous under fluorescent light,
if you did not know.

A particularly cautious bird with ink-dipped bill
takes his time with me. Does he feel friend? Does
he know home?

I know maybe, and occasionally, friend.
I lost track of home, the years too murky now
to bother with sifting. I feather a new nest and
hope for the best.

A child’s chubby green ball rolls toward
my Mr. Maybe, who refuses its advances.
One leap—

one flap of what he surely does
not think of as wings—

and Mr. Maybe is aloft on a clear gust of yes.
I am dead to him, gone from him, comfortably
nothing. We never happened.

To my right, sand-bound like I, a bright blond boy
in blue rolls an unhappy inner tube, then casts it
off to run to his mother.

Mommy: his call as plaintive as the gulls’.
I understand what he is saying.
Mommy. Want. Stop. Let’s. Please.

Mr. Maybe floats overhead, in no hurry to steer
his latest yes. In the water below him,
delicious dark bodies, faces and details indecipherable,
offer their own yes to each wave. Yes in the
clasped hands, yes in the surety of the duck dive,
yes in each hoot, each more-scream of laughter.

It is impossible not to smile. Even my constant
gnaw of unknowing allows this, here, as south as
I have ever needed to be. I am no one but I see
everyone—

the surfers beyond the swimmers beyond the bathers
beyond the splashers beyond the waders—

everyone from here, beautifully and
surely IS.

During all of this is,
seabirds’ names alight on my tongue.

Sandpiper, cormorant, kestrel, egret.

I have become accustomed to not knowing
what I am seeing, right in front of these
bleary eyes that profess, from time to time,
to be mine.

(Am I sure they are? I don’t understand
what they have seen. The shoulds tell
me these sights are not meant for me.)

Last week’s best-case scenario is this week’s
truism, this week’s grace. And yet I have the
gall to betray it with dismay.

At least remember to smile, I tell myself.
I judge others as judging me although no one
dares say yea or nay. The human call:
maybe, maybe, maybe.

Speaking of truth and dare:
the wind dares the waves to race,
have you seen this? Did you know?

I’d have to say the wind is the clear
winner, if my heels in the cooling sand
are today’s finish line.

I would outrun both the sea and the wind
if only I could get to my own finish line,
the yellow ribbon the sallow crowd shouting
that I am home, I am here, I have done it,
finally. Well done, well done, well done.

The wind is too much for my Mr. Maybe.
He flies away in a yes formation
of one, while the sandpipers

(is that what they are? how would I know?)

claim real estate at 2 o’clock of me, a patch
of damp sand the size of our welcome mat.

(Catch me. I said our. Did you see the spark?)

The sandpipers dig greedily into their property,
drawn to life by a child: stick legs, spindly beaks.

So fragile, I think, I judge.

I imagine the sandpipers mocking my assessment:
so human, so idiotic. Judgment by an even frailer
animal, one not smart enough to claim its space,
believe in its own home.

Fragile, they would say, unearthing
squirming gold just under the wet sand’s surface.

Fragile,
can you imagine,
can you just imagine.

—for Veronica

The waves come and the waves go.

I am sitting in the sand, leaning against a square concrete bonfire pit by the Pacific Ocean. I study the Ocean Beach pier in the distance. I take a few pictures of kids playing in the shallow waves.

The waves come and the waves go, like Anthony. He approaches, sits beside me in the warm sand. I’m wary. He’s missing a bunch of teeth. I don’t understand what he’s saying at first.

If he wants something, he’s not going to play that card right away. Latino, probably Antonio, from New Castle, Delaware. He tells me it’s not bad here, in San Diego, but the people are friendlier in Oklahoma.

I tell him I’m from Philadelphia. I tell him I’m sure that the people here know I’m an outsider, with my dark hair and pale skin and all the worry behind my eyes.

I tell him there sure are a lot of blonde women.

Sure, he looks at them, he tells me, but he thinks I’m pretty, I shouldn’t worry. How old are you, he wants to know.

Guess, I say. Go on.

His eyes are glassy. His face is dirty bronze. He studies me.

27, he says. Or 31. Late twenties, early thirties.

41, I say, not caring whether his guess was a calculated move.

You? he says. 41? Naw.

Yeah, I say. How about you?

Guess, he says.

I study his eyes, a green, lighter than mine. 41, I say. You’re my age, aren’t you? 1970 baby.

You know it, he says, pleased.

I get the feeling we’ve both seen some stuff, I say. Different stuff, maybe. But not always so good.

I don’t know why I say it. It’s true, but I don’t know why I say it.

Yeah, he agrees. I’ve got real bad dreams.

I’ve got ‘em too, I say. The PTSD. The kind that stays with you all day. You?

Yeah, the PTSD. You cry a lot? he asks.

I cry a lot, I say.

I do too, he says. You got a boyfriend?

Yeah, I say. I got a fella. But maybe I’ll see you down here again.

Aw, the only way you can be sure you’re gonna see me again is to give me your number, he says, working it now.

Ha, I say. I’m a lady, we ladies can’t just go around giving out our numbers. It’s hard, being a girl in this world. But you’re cute for trying.

He laughs. Yeah, not a lot of women look at me no more, not like this, he says. They don’t know what I seen. I was military once.

I figure everybody’s got their own thing they’re dealing with, I say, not knowing what to say. But some, they shut down. Stop seeing the other people around them.

He nods. We stare at the ocean together for a moment.

What do you do? he wants to know.

I’m a writer. I was an actor too. In New York, I say. Until I got knocked up. That changes everything.

He looks impressed. What you get locked up for? he wants to know.

No, knocked up, not locked up. Though it’s kind of the same thing, sometimes.

Yeah, yeah, I hear that. He laughs. So you were a journalist?

Nah, I write stories, plays. I was a playwright, not Broadway, but little stuff, done around the country, here and there.

So off-Broadway, yeah?

Yeah, I say. Off-off-off. You write? You look like a guy with a story or two.

Yeah, I’m a poet, sometimes.

I knew it, I say. I bet you got a book in you. I can see it in your face.

He nods. I bet I do, yeah. I seen some stuff.

So how do you get by, I ask. I’d give you a couple bucks but all I got on me is my camera today.

Naw, it’s cool, just came to make conversation, he tells me. Sometimes, you just need a little conversation.

I hear you. How you doing out here?

I got about $30 bucks. It’s hard, man. I won’t lie. Sometimes I take the freight trains, late at night.

Dude, that’s dangerous. You gotta be careful, you hear me? I’ve been researching hobos, from the 30s, right? Missing legs, man.

Really? You’re readin’ about the hobos? He laughs, surprised. I don’t jump on the moving trains.

You promise?

I promise, he says. You talk to the hobos here?

Nah, not yet. It’s hard, you know, being a woman. You gotta stay smart, you gotta be careful, especially if something bad happened to you before, is what I say.

Yeah, I hear that, he agrees.

I would talk to more people, but I get scared, I say. Some bad stuff went down when I was younger. I want my daughters to feel good about talking to people, but it’s hard, you know? I don’t know what to tell them. They’ve gotta be careful.

Yeah, a woman, you gotta be careful. I get that. It’s different for men.

But I’m glad you came over to talk. I gotta get back, gotta help the fella move. Maybe I’ll see you here again though.

Yeah, you never know. I keep moving, so.

I know, I figured. But maybe. You hang in, be safe, okay?

That’s a pair of socks over there, he says, gesturing behind me. You see that?

Yeah. White tube socks, on the side of the bonfire pit.

They look clean, I say. Clean enough, right?

Yeah, he says. Don’t look like they belong to nobody.

Nah. You should definitely take ‘em.

He takes them in one dirty hand, stuffs them in his beat-up backpack.

We get up to go.

Take care of yourself, Anthony.

You too. He leans over, gives me a hug.

You smell good, he says.

Thanks, I say. I need a shower.

Yeah, he says, I need one too.

Just no moving trains, got it?

Got it, he says. Got it.

I had this great longing to be in love
this morning, he says.

Then I had lunch, and shrugged it off.
Too time-consuming.

I tell him he makes me laugh. He is
Chekhov’s lost one, who strayed from
the Promised Land of Moscow
in search of a Hollywood sitcom.

I wish I was trying to be funny, he says.

Morose: this word belongs to him,
although he has yet to lay claim to it.

He claims very little as his:
not his wit,
not his past life working the Borscht Belt,
nor his longing—

from time to time—

for something like a hand in his,
or a different quiet, a different still
reclining beside him whenever and wherever
there is no need to be funny,
no need for a laugh track.

—for dear NK

Her father mentions a new dance class she’s interested in: ballet.

She beams at me hopefully. I can feel the panic, the noose tightening around my neck. I can’t bear to tell him in front of her I am behind in payments to her other dance class, her only extracurricular activity, I still haven’t paid for the zebra costume, I can’t do any more than I am doing, I can’t even do what I am trying to do.

I read an article not long ago that argued that you need to be rich to be poor. I was stunned by this truth. Living hand to mouth: there’s only so much that you can fit in a hand. Forget buying in bulk, forget memberships to gyms and co-ops, forget Amazon prime for free shipping, forget anything with an annual fee that would save you mucho money down the line, forget flying a certain airline so points can accrue and rewards can actually be gained, forget any advance planning to save money, forget always paying bills on time so there’s no penalty charges. You can’t pay bills on time, because you have to feed your kids and clothe your kids. So you know you’ll get hit with the charges. It becomes an ugly, dirty little fact of life: you are at the mercy of your bank account.

Forget investing, forget a 401K, forget a savings account. Your life is triage, and triage is a checking account that’s bleeding out, all the time.

When you’re broke and teetering on the edge of losing everything you have, you pay top dollar, because you live and breathe and need and consume in the now. Hand to mouth: you need to pay for whatever you can grab in your fist, and no more. You pay ten bucks for gas at the wrong time of the month at the wrong station because you need it right then, instead of paying fifty at the right time, at the right station. You pay for ten bucks of gas because you need the other forty for medicine and food and clothes for the kid who’s growing more and feels guilty about it. They’re both growing, sure, but the younger one will get by on hand-me-downs. The older one, she’s taller than her friends. You’ve maxed out the hand-me-downs for her.

The to-do list, that slippery slope, is long. The windshield is cracked. The house roof is worn to shit. The sump pump is long dead. You need an exterminator. The weatherization-assistance program is booked until mid-summer. You haven’t seen your family out West in years, because you can’t. If you go anywhere, it’s because someone who loves you is paying to see you. If you do anything special for your kids, who know better than to ask for anything, you feel guilty or they feel guilty. You want them to feel like the other kids they know, but they are not like the other kids.

There are only so many times you can ask for help. People get frustrated, hearing and reading about your situation. They feel irritated, they feel guilty, they feel confused if this is not a life they understand from personal experience. This is not a society that’s comfortable with poverty or need. It says something about you, if you’re still in this place. You must be lazy, you must not be thinking clearly, you must not be working hard enough to improve your life.

It gets dirtier. You used to think you would never, this or that. Now, you know you’d have to think twice, you know you might consider doing an unmentionable or two, turning off your mind and letting someone have your body if it meant the kids were happier, the fridge was full, the debt was gone for a year or two. You feel dirty, just thinking it, but there it is: not half as dirty as it once might have seemed.

You’ve already been stripped.

Bankruptcy strips you of credit. You need money and credit to borrow money and get more credit. You don’t qualify for home equity loans to do necessary repairs on the house—repairs that would save you money over time—because of your wrecked credit and freelance employment history.

Divorce impoverishes. Suddenly, whatever limited resources existed before must stretch to accommodate two households. Sharing custody 50-50, ironically, costs dearly. In Massachusetts, if both parents struggle, there’s no alimony, there’s no child support. Let me repeat that: there’s no alimony, there’s no child support. You can’t leave the state to find a better life, not without your co-parent. If your co-parent wants to stay nearby, you shut up and stay. It’s just the way it is, unless you want to leave your kids behind and send money home. There’s no “getting a lawyer” (because where would that money come from?), there’s no “move into cheaper housing.”

My mortgage is $500 a month for a 3-bedroom house, the lowest mortgage I know of, and still I worry how we will eat each month. I sent my kids to their grandmother’s house the other night, because it would buy me one more day of dinner at home. I dropped them off, and I ran. Because I was too embarrassed to try to explain this, to my own mother.

Student loans: if you started poor, you tend to stay poor. If you don’t come from much, education is a massive burden. You get the education hoping it will take you far. When it doesn’t, you’re demoralized by your own failure and the sense that the joke’s on you: in my case, it’s a $65,000 joke, and I’m not free of it. $65,000. What does that sum represent to you?

The struggle to recover from mental illness is also damn expensive. This isn’t the place to explain. It’s not safe. I’m sorry for that. I’d like to tell you more. Ask me, in private. If not, you’ll just have to trust me when I tell you the cost has been devastating, to wallet and psyche.

If I were on my own, if I did not share custody 50-50, I would not still be where I am. I would cut my losses and put aside my fondness for being a country mouse to find city work.

When you’re poor in the United States, you’re not having Third World problems, necessarily. But you’re not having First World problems, either. We’re mired in the Second World, a financial purgatory that goes unmentioned. You look fine enough, your kids look well enough, you’re no Dickens character, from what your community can see. You hide how bad it is. You do your best to limit playdates at your house to only the kids closest to your kids, kids with parents who already have a sense of how you live. You try to get out of driving or chaperoning trips, because you can’t afford the gas. You love your kids’ teachers as much as anyone else does, but you dread the end of the year, when it’s time to kick in to the gift pot. All around you, twenties and fifties are flying. You’ve got a crumpled dollar bill in the bottom of your purse, and it seems more insulting to offer that up than nothing at all.

On the way to school the other morning, from the backseat:

Sophie: Altered DNA is the answer to the universe.

Hattie B: [decisively] NO. 42 is the answer to the universe.

I think this exchange would hold up in a court of law as proof I am doing something right here.

1.

He wants his shirt back.
I am sitting on your bed
when this news arrives.

Oh my, you say, eyes
wide: all mischief, no malice.
We lived to tell. Who

gloats with a car wreck
smoking fresh behind? Lucky,
is all, we know it.

2.

Cal-i-for-nye-ay:
I will erase the red X
on my map. I’m glad,

I admit it. All
the sun in Massachusetts
can’t warm me like you.

3.

New York, Nevada:
Pockmarked states, my heart’s logic.
I’ve been wrong before.

Laugh, yes, laugh. Tell me
wherever we go becomes
yours and mine again.

I am alone tonight. The potluck has been rescheduled, due to prior engagements and the Oscars and a missing tooth and a Vicodin hangover.

I cook anyway, amid the chaos. The house is an absurd, comical mess, as it always is by Sunday after my on-week with the girls. Cobwebs, dog fur, rugs askew, bills pondering mass suicide at the edge of the dining room table, a sink full of slimy pots and plates and crusting oatmeal and sour milk. I try not to judge myself by my housekeeping, but still I wonder, What will my daughters remember of this time?

Because my phantom tooth hurts, because the house is too large when the girls have just left, I am making chicken soup—Karmen’s recipe. The recipe has hung on my refrigerator for several years, written in Karmen’s hand, the ingredients drawn in her colorful voice. Her way. I don’t have all the ingredients, but Karmen taught me that soup, like love, can bear improvisation.

I dig the wishbone out of the chicken carcass (Ingredient No. 10) with a little shudder. I realize I have never liked the wishbone nor what it represents. Who enjoys this game? I’ve never wanted to take part in a competition that involves the snapping of a bone (desecration on top of desecration on the way to soup), a competition in which the loser must forfeit luck.

I know how hard luck is to come by. I have no interest in swiping it from another, her loss being my gain. I’ll find my luck elsewhere, thank you. Go on. You take it.

Choo. Choo. Choo. CHUP CHUP CHUP CHUP.

Choo. Choo. Choo. Choo. CHUP CHUP CHUP CHUP.

Choo. Choo. Choo. CHUP CHUP CHUP CHUP CHUP CHUP.

I lean against the doorframe, looking out into the backyard, watching the dogs snuffle the perimeter. Overhead, in the spindly pine tops, unseen birds call out, in their respective languages.

I listen for a change, instead of my usual rummaging for the half-and-half, tearing open bills, tick-tock, time is money, or so I’ve heard.

Choo. Choo. Choo. CHUP CHUP CHUP. What could that mean? This bird is a poet, diligently testing her Morse code of meter and rhythm above the modest millworkers’ houses that line the neighborhood’s steep streets.

A. A. A. B. B. B. No, no good. Better with four chups. A. A. A. B. B. B. B.

I realize I don’t speak bird. I am fluent in dog, passable now in cat, but I have no idea what this bird is saying. Is she telling us to scram, get out of her yard? Is she even a she?

Choo. Choo. Choo. CHUP CHUP CHUP CHUP CHUP CHUP CHUP: a particularly daring sequence, heavy on the Bs. Perhaps she has not noticed us. How arrogant of me, I think suddenly, to wonder if I might factor into her day at all. There have been birds in these treetops for a couple hundred years, all with little reason to pay heed to the odd two-legged creatures far below. The squirrels are the sworn enemies of the two-legged and four-legged creatures. The birds are above this sort of ongoing fuss—literally and figuratively. They have far more pressing matters with which to occupy themselves: owls, too-clean window panes, securing nests of blind babies in treetops that whip and groan in New England gusts.

Choo. Choo. Choo. CHUP. CHUP. CHUP. She won’t go less than three choos. She is steadfast. She knows that two choos do not a sturdy poem make.

I admire her diligence and her discipline. I would like to know more about her. But without seeing her, I don’t know how to find out more. Can I Google a bird call? Do others hear it as I do, as a sequence of choos and chups? Years ago, I was certain my breastpump was crooning SACAJAWEA, over and over, but others heard COPPER PENNY and IN THE MIRROR.

Choo. Choo. Choo. CHUP CHUP CHUP CHUP. She is leaning toward this version, 3 As, 4 Bs. She keeps coming back to it. I like it, too. Three long choos, four terse chups. It’s pleasing in its insistence.

One, two, three, PAY-ATTENTION-STAND-UP-STRAIGHT.

One, two, three, HUSH-AND-HEAR-ME.

One, two, three, I-SEE-YOU-YOU-CAN’T-SEE-ME.