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Summer movies pour corn heats the aquarium the action flicks send kids lined
around the corner laughing at visuals heads slightly go
all the pretty colors, raucous noise the heroes get to do it mouths
slightly open beckoning.
The door opened we shuffle, critique, dip into heat blanket
become our own midnight sky black mast envelops an evening.
*
The ice man comes with colors, safety, silence, in heat cats claw, kids run up, wrappers with blue green pink, waters like out of water.
Motorcyclists set off alarms, neighbor says: they must have small penises gives her
cigarette a puff.
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Opalescent moon barely detected though at least this far downtown you
do see sky we all note this with pride as if this is the prize.
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In the local magazine you can add up how you are doing against the rest and see the newest eatery or purchase the best sale item as long as there’s no malfunctioning and you’re hydrated, you may stand proud and think of the guy with ragged jeans who declared in the interview: my style-- sweaty and hot, and we all get to think how figurative or literal this is supposed to mean but whatever he got the last image/word and we are in the fields hunting brightly colored eggs.
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When we asked where she was going she said why do you ask she gave us a flier about her alarm
system that she emphasized was always on and had the alarm company call to arrange our free consultation.
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On the phone on a religious holiday she said I am outraged, you have the audacity to discover I order the NY Times this is an intrusion a misdemeanor of city laws and she signed off the phone without a name just a code, 2F.
Other members don’t mention: flowers, new garbage cans, smell of rat, smell of spinach, the police, the Jehovahs, missing paintings, the pot smoker, the actor/musician/coffee shop worker/ the documentarian and product placement photographer, the PR person for local politician.
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He always has a wide smile so I give him a lot. He has the Blue Lagoon look with sleepy eyes. His music jiggles my rooms. He always recognizes me out in the bigger streets.
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The windows never open some are without screens and we can’t find some to fit or we did and it cost too much and we’d rather have generated air.
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The day the cat got lost was the biggest group effort we all cared.
My heart racing as footsteps go up and down the lock wildly turned again and again.
But it doesn’t matter
you can see a star at a deli, a star pushing her babies without maternity fat
in a casual hat, sunglasses.
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Language takes the subway for a ride no matter the cold it’s earnest and powered to run you care less and less about the next door cubicle behind the desk that you place your food order where you shot this e-mail.
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You tune back and forth the antenna wobbles disrupted by helicopters doing their evening sightings, the cameras go click and something shuts and pretends to nap though overworking vigorously, just no production shown.
The buildings block this building so light between is what you can call yours
and if you are without clothes on the couch you feel you have the right
to show your body to the light and anyone who’s watching.
*
The screen is your friend though you want it to go away the screen is perverse it wants to reel: woman expecting killed was it fields was it woods were there parts dragged onto earth.
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The shark inside but you can’t find it
You bait it with a bleeding minnow but it’s not enough for such strong teeth
That want to gnash the meat of real bodies.
The fin dips in your corners its nose just below water.
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The shark knows about escape and tells you then to move out you have the wrong address attached to your persona, you can live with bumpkins, own a dilapidated farm, this is where the pot boils, the ticking tocks.
He’s gone in a flurry the rivulets of water curl away coldly scolding he urinates in the stream he leaves behind and it stings you the yellow stench.
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JENNIFER FIRESTONE is from San Francisco and currently lives in Brooklyn. She was recently appointed the Poet In Residence at Eugene Lang College (The New School). Her work has appeared in How2, Can We Have Our Ball Back, Fourteen Hills, Dusie, moria, MIPOesias and others. Her latest chapbook, from Flashes, is published by Sona Books. She is co-editing an anthology called Letters To Poets: Conversations about Poetics, Politics and Community, which includes writers such as Anne Waldman, Brenda Iijima, Leslie Scalapino, Kathleen Fraser, Jill Magi, Victor Hernandez Cruz, Eileen Myles, Albert Flynn DeSilver and Wanda Coleman. Excerpts from Letters are currently being featured in Jacket Magazine.
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