Last week, we couldn’t agree on a time
or place to meet up. I wanted Manhattan,
you wanted Brooklyn. I wanted weekday,
you wanted weekend. You listed all the reasons why
you couldn’t come. “dont you know my parents,” you texted
me, no capital letters, no capitalization.
I do know your parents. They’re Republicans, you
live in the suburbia of the city. Your life is lonely.
I live in a in-the-process-of-gentrification
neighborhood amongst brick shacks and
two-family apartment building blueprints. Everyone here us
lonely. I told you to call your grandfather for a lift,
call an Uber, lie. You said you
wouldn’t do any of those things.
Do you think you are the only one with a crap parent?
Two months ago, my father threw a trash can at my
mother. It hit her in the middle of her back
And I thought she would never be able
to pray to God hard enough.
Two years before that, he laid two guns on the
dining room table and said he would not be afraid

if he had to. I was hoping to meet you somewhere,
a cute cafe in Soho,
a rustic diner in Park Slope,
a hidden used bookstore in Greenwich Village.
I don’t even want the pack of expensive Japanese
pens from Muji you ordered for me online.
Sometimes everything feels too breathless.
I love air, but I
don’t want to breathe. I was hoping for one last
reason to be an is and not a was. But sometimes
things overlap and sometimes they don’t and
sometimes things are always on a
Newton’s cradle and sometimes they are meant to be that way.
I lie to leave and I run to never be found.