Eloise

Prose poems, 2017

Excerpts from a longer work, Terminus. Originally published in Perjus magazine.

How to be a New Yorker:

1. Move to the city.
2. Spend a decade of your life
lost and wandering its streets.

Ten years is how long it takes
to be haunted by your own ghost,
where everywhere you go
reminds you of what you’ve already done.

There are places you can never revisit.
All the dive bars that got eaten by wine bars,
all the second chances foreclosed by new management,
all the apartments your lovers long discarded, like you,
terrible holes in the skyline.

As Colson Whitehead once wrote in the Times,
“you are a New Yorker the first time you say,
‘That used to be Munsey’s’ or
‘That used to be the Tic Toc Lounge...’
You are a New Yorker when what was there before
is more real and solid
than what is here now.”

As Eloise once said,
tourists think this place is teeming with life
when it’s death that hangs over everything,
every sideswiping bus
and drunken walk home,
every subway grate trapdoor
and trou-de-loup to a bodega basement.

We stagger along
not survivors, but zombies
of the many past selves we have been
while the skin we’ve shed
tumbles through Central Park,
like the black plastic tumbleweeds
of yesterday’s trash.

02. Your Humble Narrator

If a portrait artist were to sketch me nude,
tied up in my bedsheets as I wake up alone,
I would ask her not to exaggerate
the juxtaposition of my bushy eyebrows—
   thick and untrammeled, like a bundle of twigs
   tied above my dust blue eyes—
with my nearly bare skull,
normally worn smooth, yet currently stippled
by a week’s worth of sandpaper scruff.

My chest, however, is fair game:
something women notice the moment we undress
is the concave indent
where my sternum and rib cage didn’t grow right,
a deep, sunken dent below my neckline
while my ribs flare out, like a soup can with botulism,
literal damaged goods.

(Every once and awhile, when no one’s around,
I’ll lie on my couch
and fill that valley with spoonfuls of cornflakes,
turning my own personal pothole
into a snack bowl.)

If an impressionist artist
were to paint me right now
at my bedroom window, leaning partway out
while sipping from a mug of Bustelo that’s already gone cold
and eyeing the people on 125th
as they shuffle around with their backpacks and shopping bags,
I’d ask her to focus on the fresh morning light
pouring in from the east
and blur out my face.

If an abstract expressionist
were to render my mood
in paint drips and brush flicks,
splatters and scrapes,
it’d be messy, violent, and broadly panned by critics
who’ve seen better subjects
worth spilling their adjectives on.

And if a prehistoric artist
carved me out in petroglyph,
I’d want to be remembered for ten thousand years
as a towering chieftain in splendid headdress
leading my tribe of stick figures
off a cliff.

03. “Everything and anything except me”

I have one vinyl record
for the phonograph in my mind
where a cheap impersonation of Gil Scott-Heron
does a spoken-word monologue
about the shit I need to do.

I have one thousand books
I have yet to read
scattered across my one-bedroom apartment,
some rising around me in drab, sagging towers
like the prefab housing projects
of the Soviet Bloc under Khrushchev,
temporary slums made permanent
by a promise of prosperity endlessly deferred.

(The last book I gave up on,
Ellison’s Invisible Man,
is on the floor near my mattress,
dogeared at page 9,
too dense for me to chew through.
I have nothing in common
with its nameless protagonist
except that I, too, live in Harlem
in a building with only white people,
and I enjoy the hollow thrill
of leaving the lights on at all hours,
wasting power just because I can.)

I have one million empty boxes
hanging vacant and faded on my to-do list,
appointments and birthday cards,
cable bills and bleeding gums,
all these thoughts turning gray and flavorless
like a wad of Juicy Fruit
from the night before.

I have to get out of here.

04. Spirals

My building has two towers
of narrow staircases, each as airless
as a catacomb and no deeper
than an alley dumpster, but with shallow steps
that slip down down down then turn
at abrupt right angles
to scruffed platforms of cheap tile,
caked in years of grime. Each floor
has generous bay windows
jutting out from the landing, but with a view
of the ass of the building next door,
just pipes and rust and corrugated metal,
row after row of ticky-tack units and
Package Terminal Air Conditioning
sinking like blackheads recessed into walls,
their drainage basins brimming with mold. The glass,
streaked by fingertips, is two inches thick
and sealed year-round, yet this stops no one from smoking,
or having hushed, sobbing phone calls
that echo one floor directly above and below
like tearful confessions in a cavernous church.
On the penultimate floor,
a torn square gold foil wrapper
glints in the corner, the shell of a lambskin condom
that is mercifully nowhere to be seen
(and was hopefully availed of elsewhere in private,
not in the tower itself). On the final flight
leading to ground level, words scrawled
in four foot letters, ballpoint pen on the wall,
RIP MY BROTHER CJW 4EVER
one last memento mori
before daybreak.

12. Eloise

I finally get a seat at Fulton Street,
the last stop before plunging under the river,
and as I start to slide into the icy grip of sleep
I picture the girl who got the best of me.

The night I met Eloise
she said in her husky rich girl’s voice,
“I’m no good when it comes to nice guys.”
So I told her the truth. “I’m not a nice guy.”

She had an apartment near NYU
but we’d often stay at her mom’s place
on 81st Street across from the Met,
in the little room where she grew up.
A lifetime of nannies and doormen,
boarding schools and riding lessons,
yet she still wound up sharing a full size bed
with a guy from nowhere
who can’t even tie a tie
without looking it up on YouTube.

The thing I remember most
about the freefall of those early days
is how much she would linger,
like a grease stain in fabric, soaked through the fibers.
I would smell her musk at breakfast,
taste her neck at lunch,
lie awake after dinner hearing the rasp of her whisper.
In the unforgiving hangover of morning,
each scalding sip of food truck coffee
would remind me of the way she’d bite my lip
to signal she was done with kissing.

We put labels on nothing,
referring to what we had
as “whatever this is,”
thinking that we could prolong it
by never speaking its name.

Till late one night,
after sex in my apartment,
we didn’t smoke or fall asleep,
but decided instead to lie on our backs,
naked in the moonlight, fingers entwined,
the way I imagine Adam and Eve would be
alone in the garden before the fall.
We talked for hours while staring at the ceiling
till a sudden pause left us suspended in air.
Finally I said, “Can you feel how much I love you?”
And she sounded relieved. “I love you, too.”

We were both happier for having said it.
We tingled and grinned.

And neither of us were lying.
We were just wrong.

Back on the A train
I let my eyes go blurry, then dark
and decide to sleep through Brooklyn.

35.

I rented you a longboard
and held your hand as you stepped gamely into the water,
your long hair cascading down your face in tendrilled curls
while your jaw locked into a permanent scowl,
determined to hide your nervousness.

You paddled out on your belly,
nose slightly above surface,
scooping your arms forward with your chest on the board.
And the surf was choppy, the ocean numbing;
it was far later in the season than we had intended,
teetering close to the equinox.
So many gray clouds stacked on top of each other
it looked like the sky was missing.

But when the moment came
you pushed down on the board,
springing up in one fluid motion
with your knees bending into a crouch
and your hands flailing wildly, grasping for balance.

You rode the wave
for precisely one second
before tumbling backward,
your wetsuit-shrinkwrapped body
disappearing into the cold, frothy deep.

I lost you.
You did not surface after the wave crashed,
nor did you answer when I cried out, “Eloise? Where are you?”
and for the first time, I noticed the leash string of your board
hanging off the tail without you
as it drifted away.

And there you were,
emerging from the water in front of me
with a half-laugh, half-gasp,
hair matted across your eyes.
“Holy shit!” you said. “Did you see that? Did you see me?”
And I did.

36.

The sun is gone now
as the stars make their pivot into view.

The ocean is empty
except for its roar.

Laughter and revelry waft dimly in the air
from the partygoers ensconced in their bars.

A dead seagull lies rotting near the jetty
as metallic green blow flies swarm the carcass,
tucking their eggs carefully under flaps of flesh.

A child’s plastic shovel lies buried
under five feet of sand, entombed,
rotting to dust over a thousand years
in a silent grave.

Dim echoes of music pulse in from the west.
A siren pierces the night as the cops give chase.
Small crabs scurry sideways across the dunes.
Waves lap at my toes.
Everything coming to a close and beginning.
All the world in symmetric repose.

And in this moment, I feel it:
it’s time to go.