The beach after a 10-minute thunderstorm \\ Elegy for a Person I Saw in a VHS Tape \\ Treadmill \\ City Noise

The beach after a 10-minute thunderstorm

there’s more trash
than usual
on the dock

the smell of rotting food blends
with damp wood,
beached lake scum

this is not the usual
fresh post-rain smell

the dock
bends
more than it used to,

the wetness has made it
spineless,
the rain has
taken the sand out from
under it

the tunnels that the
downhill overflow
traced toward the lake
have created new terrain of the
once-soft sand:
hardened scar tissue of
once-soft skin

Elegy for a Person I Saw in a VHS Tape

There’s a home video that we can’t
watch anymore
because our VCR
broke

I remember it,
though

I’m the age where you’re walking
but it’s still a bit
wobbly

My mom’s voice, static
in an old camera:
“Don’t fall down!”

I laugh,
the babble of a brook that
has been dry for
longer than the VCR has been
broken

then,
I fall down,
still laughing

this is in memory
of VHS-tape me,
the one who would fall down without thinking
about how hard the ground is
the one who had a laugh that bubbled
over
the one who didn’t yet know
how hard it is
to get back
up

Treadmill

I went on a walk
in the nighttime,
after a day that could have stretched over
two,

the sky was burnt orange behind
a thick curtain of mist,
it had the glow of
a sunset,
or a sunrise

the horizon was black,
the sky didn’t know
what time it was

the underbelly of panic,
life, noise,
seeped
into the silence like
mist carrying
a subtle, almost imperceptible
wetness
into the air:
you could feel it
sinking
into your skin

under the orange mist,
the road felt like
a treadmill:

time stretching and winding
in front of
me,
every day is
too many days

I’m thinking about all the things I said I didn’t
have enough
time
for, how
now that I have
seemingly endless time
I don’t do them

maybe it was never about
the time

I keep staring into my
white walls,
getting lost looking at
a canvas I’ll never
fill,
wasted time passing in a parallel universe and I
emerge, unscathed, with an entire day
ahead of me
that I will fill with
nothing

I’ll feel bad
about the nothing

not bad enough to do something,
but bad enough to stop me
from doing something
Tomorrow.

City Noise

Right after I wake up
everything is too loud

The cars passing by
send tremors through my room
the creaks of my house are screeches echoing through the hallway.
Birds chatter on top of one another,
the wind pounds my walls—a meaty fist trying to knock its way in
the leaves crunch like bones
everywhere it is
honks and pounds and creaks and screeches and
screams.

This entire week
has felt too loud.

Every stranger’s conversation felt like
it was happening in my head
words layering over words until I could not find
the ones that were mine

Music and chittering and the whiz of traffic and the
booming laughter of men who could be a threat and the
clacking of a keyboard or maybe high heels on pavement
or maybe both and
the far-off shout of a woman saying nonsense
or maybe
asking for help
or maybe both
or maybe those words
were mine
and I couldn’t hear them